Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

What You Lose on the Swings You Make Up on the Merry-Go-Round.

Life is hard but being stupid makes it harder.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

You cannot write well without data.

The Red Sox are a religion. Every year we re-enact the agony and the temptation in the Garden. Baseball child's play? Hell, up here in Boston it's a passion play.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.

The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines.

Rental formal wear of the sky-blue, brocade and shiny varieties is favored by upwardly mobile young gangsters drafted as groomsmen for weddings.

You'll have time to rest when you're dead.

I am not greedy of money myself, but the monotony of always screwing and paring is more tiresome than the monotony of riches.

I wish you could see some of the girls I have genuinely had crushes on in my life. They're not the girls you would assume.

Live every act fully, as if it were your last.

Learn to think imperially.

But 'Playboy' was liberating. I was drawn to it and went for it full throttle.

It is impossible for the nation to develop unless states develop, the process of policy planning also has to change from 'top to bottom' to 'bottom to top

Every minute spent worrying about 'the way things were' is a moment stolen from creating 'the way things can be'

Social media does not change your culture, it reveals it.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.