I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.

I sailed on the cold air currents above the rooftops of Paris. I could see the river, the Louvre Museum, the gardens and palaces. And a mouse-yum. Hang on, Carter, I thought. not hunting mice.

This woman’s size protected herfrom the hurts of the worldbut it also imprisoned her soul. As the merry-go-round revolved, she ate another French fry, as a silent scream frozen on her face.

The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn't cost the government a dime.

Courage doesn't mean we're not afraid anymore, it just means our actions aren't controlled by our doubts.

Better to live your life open rather than exist on borrowed time, waiting for the great unmasking.

The truly great ones rely on substance, and not on surface, hold on to the fruit, and not to the flower.

Any breakdown is a breakthrough.

Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.

On his 916th game as coach at University of Alabama - I've been here so long that when I got here the Dead Sea wasn't even sick.