Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings.

I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand, that Joplin had the last drunken throat, that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.

Luck is not as random as you think.Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art - an individual masterpiece.

Negativity is born in the gap where love has been excluded.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.

Life is a long pilgrimage from fear to love.

Twenty-five years ago nobody knew much about white sharks.

Nothin'," Alex says. "We'll talk later, chica. It's not a big deal." "Don't chica me, Alex," his bride snaps. "I think she's gonna deck him," Ben murmurs, amused.

I didn't become an actor to have power, but it just happens that I have it and so I have a lot of opportunities.

It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.