Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

There's a kind of ear music . . . a rhythmic synchronicity which creates a kind of heartbeat on the page.

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

Writing is a kind of free fall that you then go back and edit and shape.

You know, right often, the body is the best thing we’ve got going for us. A body itself is a shiny object. Something!

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

I do what I do merrily out of curiosity because I want to know how the brain works. That will get me up early in the morning and keep me going all day long.

I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.

You're a public menace. You shouldn't be allowed out on your own.

I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state.

Nothing teaches you like getting leveled. And I got leveled in my early 30s. Nothing went exactly the way I thought it would.

No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.

The glow of inspiration warms us; this holy rapture springs from the seeds of the Divine mind sown in man.

Know that the mirror of the heart is boundless. . . Here, opinions become silent, otherwise they will lead you into errors. . . for the heart is sacred - even more the heart is sacredness itself.

Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.