What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.

Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it.

I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.

It's all about letting the story take over.

If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.

The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

Poverty is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor.

My sons are precious to me and I have tried incredibly hard to strike the right balance between work and home life while being acutely aware that I haven't always got it right.

Men's eyes are in their heads; women's, in their hearts.

I don't have a saviour or a royal family.

Real median household incomes in the U.S. were basically the same in 1989 as in 2014. But we are also seeing similar challenges in the U.K. in the stagnation of real wages.

I feel like having an actual taxidermy-ed mammal would get gross, like its hair would get dirty and stuff.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

I've never been arrested. I've been stopped, searched and had a gun put to my head by the Chicago cops.

The reason gas prices are so high is because the oil is in Texas and Oklahoma and all the dipsticks are in Washington.