Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

where are the snowdens of yesteryear?

When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

But how can one be warm alone?

Marriage can bore you but there is a fortitude that comes from it, too. When you need to lean on it, you are so thankful that you can.

I have loved and lost in so many different ways. And I have died endless deaths… So when I ask myself, the question today, who am I? My answer is…I do not know.

When you go into labor you see that you are not the captain of the ship. You are the ship. There is no captain. There are only the waves.

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth.   Not going all the way, and not starting.”   Siddhrtha Gautama

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.

I feel like the Internet has really freed everything up to an extent, hasn't it? That radio maybe doesn't have quite the power that it had before.

The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.

Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

Harmy is a class bowler and I think he's one of the main reasons why England have improved over the last 18 months.

Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight A student?