I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

Listen carefully. I'd crush you like a bug for causing my wife one single moment of pain. Believe it. Fear it.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

Only in Jesus are we able to pray, and with Him we also know that we shall be heard.

Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible only through the portal of the present moment.

You're either recording a hit song or you're not; you've either got something that's worth recording or you haven't.

Whatever had happened to him [Newt] out there — maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury — had been truly awful.

A good idea is something like an emotion, you just can't keep it in.

I can read minds, but I'm illiterate.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.