All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.

I was brought up in a household where you stood up to be counted.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

Yet what use against the deceit of a state are the memories of a child?

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

There is no hope for the hopeless but there is always some love for the loveless.

Children are never too young to begin the study of nature's book, and never too old to quit. ~Laura Hecox

Forgiveness is what makes adults different to children: children just forget, adults forgive.

The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

The wall of silence in the Interior Ministry, which protects those who are widely believed to have ordered this and similar crimes, remains intact.

I think the media is very much like the inside-the-Beltway crowd. They're not average Americans themselves. They're under a lot of pressure from editors and publishers.

Sense of family is enormously important to me. In the larger sense, we're all of us family; we're all of us soulmates.

You never read about the real pain. It lives where no word can travel.