What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted something alive and shocking enough that it could be a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

The ultimate source of abundance is to give love for the betterment of others.

At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.

How do we know that we have a right to kill creatures that we are so little above, as dogs, for our curiosity or even for some use to us?

The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.

It is hardly possible to estimate how many marriages fail to prosper or are actually ruined because the man lacks any inkling of the art of love.

But let's not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.

Speaking of competition in the fast-food industry. This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me.

When you photograph a lot of women, you get to know things.

There's really no way of ever knowing how the audience is going to respond to any episode or change.

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.