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.

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

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.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

One eye sees, the other feels.

Do not trust your memory it is a net full of holes the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

I wouldn't change a thing about what I've done in the past because what may have been bad choices have all led me to this moment.

Sin is not confined to the evil things we do. It is the evil within us, the evil which we are.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being; the American wants to be considered a good guy.

The attorney general should be enforcing the law, not policy.

You never know when you're making a memory.

I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't.