We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others

Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try

We all make mistakes, don't we? But if you can't forgive yourself, you'll always be an exile in your own life.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse; it's just being enacted in a new way.

I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors

I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

Where there is no mathematics, there is no freedom.

I love learning, and I think that curiosity is a wonderful gift.

His very chains helped to deceive him about the harshness of his service.

Failure either breaks people or it makes them succeed.

And when I say it, they get alarmed... 'Cause I'm louder than a bomb.

Converse, converse, CONVERSE, with living men, face to face, mind to mind-that is one of the best sources of knowledge.

America knows it has got to deal with its deficit problems so that it, too, can promise it is making its proper and best contributions to the world economy.

The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.

A doctor today would never prescribe the treatments my grandfather used in the Confederate Army, but a minister says pretty much the same thing today that a minister would have said back then.