Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?

In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all.

Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?

I'm scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I'm a laser.

But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.

It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between.

Libraries rock! Not a sermon, just a fact. As a kid I was a library rat and books changed my life. They can change yours.

Today might not be so good. But tomorrow, you got another chance to get it right.

Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

Two people can care for each other but not want the same things.

When a poor man gives something, that is a sacrifice indeed. When a rich man gives something, it hardly rises to the same level.

There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

I always wanted to be a medical doctor, and I never thought of business.

Kindness has no religion. It is like an open sky.

Great men never require experience.

In code, it never pays to rush.

I couldn't worry about anyone else but myself and my health.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside.