In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again.

Civilized countries generally adopt gold or silver or both as money.

Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music.

Let's just say that if you were stealing TVs instead of thoughts, you would have been caught by a half-deaf, mostly blind, fifteen year old dog three robberies ago.

There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way.

I imagine that my characters have become much more complicated than when I first began, which would be normal

Older patients who live alone can become depressed.

Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way.

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another.