Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

God will ignite all that was extinct in your life

A fermented mind - according to nothing, we are something.

I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.

Genuine leadership is inherently moral.

The best way to revive a church is to build a fire in the pulpit.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can.

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.