It was better not to get too close to another person. The closer you got, the more likely you were to get hurt.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Arrival often brings nothing but a sense of desolation and disappointment.

Life is so extraordinary. Wonderful surprises are just around the most unexpected corners.

Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.

It was good, and nothing good is truly lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours, forever

Happiness is making the most of what you have, and riches is making the most of what you've got.

She put out her hand and touched his forearm, as she would have touched some piece of porcelain or sculpture, just for the sheer animal pleasure of feeling its shape and curve beneath her fingertips.

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent's own independence.

And the wicked thing is, that when we're really upset, we always take it out on the people who are closest and whom we love the most.

Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything...Nothing happens without a reason...Nothing is impossible...(Page 180).

There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, "Listen Godzilla, you don't have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine".

It sounds formulaic now, but at the time, I was interested in the difference between the thing and the representation of the idea of the thing - the space between the two.

I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

The Western world is ... looked upon as being arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. And Sept. 11 is an occasion for me to realize it even more.

The commitment had disappeared, and although he still watched the imagined glory of stealing, she could see now he was not believing. He was trying to believe it, and that’s never a good sign.

I just rocked the eye chart, So if you can't see it, now you know it by heart.

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.

When money comes in at the gate, sport flies out at the window.