I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.

I didn't say no because between safety and adventure I choose adventure.

I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

Divorce lawyers stoke anger and fear in their clients, knowing that as long as the conflicts remain unresolved the revenue stream will keep flowing.

I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.

Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.

After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

My mother was tickled and I think kind of proud when my father got hit on my an attractive middle-aged Asian lady who hadn't noticed he was with his family. He was certainly pleased about it.

I didn't flee a dictator or swim an ocean to be an American like some do. I just thought long and hard about it.

She's my kitten, and no one else's.

Being true to ourselves is about having courage to define our own version of what it is to live a successful life.

People who stay unemployed for a long time start to look like damaged goods, and they don't get such good offers. Also, they're not learning anything. Most learning is on-the-job learning.

There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.

They were doing a full back shot of me in a swimsuit and I thought, Oh my God, I have to be so brave. See, every woman hates herself from behind.

Marriage is a language of love, equality, and inclusion.

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.

That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.

Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it.

And when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.