War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war.

That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

Some folks never exaggerate-they just remember big.

I want to be a legend, like Celine Dion.

The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field.

Widows, like ripe fruit, drop easily from their perch.

The road to success just might be your driveway.

One's own self or material goods, which has more worth? Loss (of self) or possession (of goods), which is the greater evil? He who loves most, spends most, He who hoards much loses much

I understand people, and I think that my life and my history and what I represent can relate to a lot of the women, the independents, the moderate voters.

I always loved to paint. As a kid, I liked to dip my paintbrush in black ink. They gave colors to me to use, but I didn't like them very much.