His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf

It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

His conviction that everything happened for a reason, and would come to good, gave him laughing equanimity even in hard times.

The bitter heart eats its owner.

History is full of surprises.

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.

His quiet certainty made the ground beneath my feet feel solid. Like someday everything might actually be okay.

Look at the birth of anything; it's always more violent than anything you could ever imagine.

The Gulf War is responsible for the huge and horrifying rise in Islamic terrorism.

I always thought that bagels and lox was my soul food, but it turns out it's sushi.

Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.