With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Did children want sports cars for parents? No. They wanted Hondas. They wanted to know that the car would start in all seasons.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

[Hillary Clinton] is trigger happy and very unstable. Whether we like it or not, that's what's going on.

I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.

You can be anything you want to be, just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be.

Government charity gives the most to those who refuse to help themselves; private charity gives less.

I think men should be able to veto women's abortions if they're willing to care for the child after it's born.

That is, the wife must care for what the husband cares for if he is to remain resolute.

I want to work for a long, long time and keep growing in my work, and if I am very lucky and very blessed, maybe somewhere along the line there will be one movie in there that becomes a classic.