[While writing], I'll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

You know, voices can't hurt you if you don't listen to them.

If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.

Recognizing Quebec as being different, recognizing our history, recognizing our identity, has never meant a weakening of Quebec and has never been a threat to national unity.

Education and democracy have the same goal: the fullest possible development of human capabilities.

For me it's absolutely necessary to start from the very beginning. I can't think of coming and contributing something anywhere along the line other than the very start.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

Separately they had different strengths. Together they were complete.

Memories and magic is what Christmas is all about.

Accessories are everything. To me, they're more important than the clothes.

Difficulty is the nurse of greatness.