In terms of optimism, I am optimistic. I do think that, in the long term, that America will right itself. I have to think so.

A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes into my body like deep-blue blood.

It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it.

There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

Fiction has this special power. It has a power to clarify, to galvanize, to prophesy, and warn.

History is not the linear sort of movement toward better and better things.

I think that one thing fiction can offer, and must offer, is a place where someone's mind and their imagination can come to rest for a little while.

I think that fiction has this special responsibility or this special ability to help people to empathize, to demand of people that they understand other individuals and other people's experiences.

Our political divides have become our personal divides.

One thing that fiction does is it allows us to take big picture questions, big issues, big moral and socio-political changes and see how they play out on real people's lives, with real individuals.

I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.

Love them that hate you, but you can't love them whom you hate.

Finally the spring time is here.

Don't waste time with people who waste time.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does...and that someone is me

This, too, will pass.

Besides the physical ordinance of baptism and the laying on of hands, one must be spiritually born again to gain exaltation and eternal life.

The only way to improve is to set yourself harder goals.

I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.

I took up an offer for me to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It worked. I lost 30 days!