I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

There is much to be said for solitude.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

Words matter, words have import.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

If I make a wrong decision, I worry what might have been. I stress out over very insignificant things.

Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueller. And the day after tomorrow is beautiful.

Do you think you can be righteous and holy with impunity?

I just happened to have my camera and be photographing my friends. It was totally innocent; there was no purpose to the photographs. There was a purity to them that wasn’t planned; it was realism.

I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA.

Liberty is the only idea which circulates with the human blood, in all ages, in all countries, and in all literature - liberty that is, and what cannot be separated from liberty, a love of country.

Don't let go too soon, but don't hold on too long.

Sometimes people ask, 'Are hockey fights real?' I say, 'If they weren't, I'd get in more of them.