. . .I really ought to have recognized it for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Children harbor a great many doubts and sorrows that could be eased by a loving hug from a parent.

To wonder is to recreate a sacred self.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you

I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.

The other mistake I think people make is talking to who's available rather than talking to who they need to talk to.

Lack of self-worth is the fundamental source of all emotional pain. A feeling of insecurity, unworthiness and lack of valueis the core experience of powerlessness.

Next to "I win," "I told you so" are the sweetest words.

They scream, they cry, they love, they support, they defend, they listen. My fans are everything.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

I'm probably the worst at games. I don't really like computer games either. And when I lose, I won't go again but just say I don't want to play anymore.