I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings.

God Himself is not secure having given man dominion over His work.

Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.

As you yourself have said, what other explanation can there be?' Poirot stared straight ahead of him. 'That is what I ask myself,' he said. 'That is what I never cease to ask myself.

Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is 'on paper.'

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

Company culture is the backbone of any successful organization.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

The old pond, ah! A frog jumps in: The water's sound.

Oprah is more than an institution. Oprah is a very special star in the firmament. I can't imagine a greater success than she's enjoyed.

You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)