I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

An authentic life facing reality without mental equivocation is the simplest type of life.

It seems to me that government is like a pump and what it pumps up is just what we are a fair sample of the intellect the ethics and the morals of the people no better no worse.

Liberal learning is both a safeguard against false ideas of freedom and a source of true ones.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

We have a man [Donald Trump] who judges people based on their performance regardless of your gender, race, your ethnic or religious background.

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

I love my curves. You know, I'm healthy and I think thats what Sports Illustrated represents: healthy, confident women who love their bodies.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

The Buddha shared his teachings so that everyone, without exception, could reach the same supreme state of liberation that he had attained through practice and effort.