Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself.

I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

...and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.

When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.

That's one of the great advantages of age. You can say, I don't want to, I don't care, you can throw temper tantrums, and nobody minds.

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

The world has lost faith in American leadership, and the threats are mounting.

People who announce they are going to the toilet. Thanks that's an image I really didn't need.

Humanity lives in its fiction.

She gave me a false address, took off with my American Express, sunspot baby, sure had me way out guessed.

I feel very, very gratified when people are complimentary to what I have done or appreciated it with sincerity... It makes me feel that maybe I did do something that was proper and that was right.

I don't want to broadcast my personal life because I feel it's off-putting.

Justice Ginsburg is a very competent justice, and it is a joy to have her on the court, but particularly for me it is a pleasure to have a second woman on the court.

Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest truest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.