Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

You are the architect of your own loneliness.

Why do we believe one stranger and not another?

Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.

I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old.

The true value of communication is often not so much what you say to each other but the simple, powerful fact that you care enough to say something to each other so often.

you are the leader you've been looking for

Most people who make movies are in real life a bitter disappointment. I, on the other hand, am so much better in real life.

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.