What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round.

Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

Life is hard but being stupid makes it harder.

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

You cannot write well without data.

The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.

The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

There's always that one guy who gets a hold on you.

If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

God wills to be displayed and known and loved and cherished and worshiped.

When you do not have the dialogue to explain things, you will use everything to show and to tell the story. I think that this is what makes you believe that it is impeccable

Every second a seeker can start over, For his life's mistakes Are initial drafts And not the final version.

I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!

There is more in Mersenne than in all the universities together.

You won't get hurt skiing if you don't fall.