Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

My inventing time is all done under the influence of aerobic exercise. Basically, I do all my thinking while I run.

I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we're lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

What strange places our lives can carry us to, what dark passages.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

You have to discover the needs of the people you want to minister to

Someone must stand up to confront and dissipate darkness.

My favorite food from my homeland is Guinness. My second choice in Guinness. My third choice - would have to be Guinness.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

We're seeing it the same way, we're hearing the same way, we have the same conception of the situation. And so, for all purposes, we are operating with a very similar perception.

When windows shatter through a bomb, we will repair it next week because we are Afghans. That's the spirit.

Kindness is the evidence of greatness. If anyone is glad that you are here, then you have not lived in vain.

Beautiful jewelry, a beautiful room - that's what museums are - a beautiful painting, a beautiful face, it makes you feel good to look at, and that's a beautiful thing.

You learn, right, a lot of people's problems - why they get upset, why they get down, why they turn to drink - is because they can't say one word and it's N-O, no.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.