Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

I am not imposed upon by fine words

Despite the huge crowd, He speaks to His disciples as though no one else is there.

Eventually the real world intruded again, and Sophie had to return to campus—woefully behind on homework, but incandescently in love.

What's the sense in having an eclipse if you can't look at it? Somebody in production sure slipped up this time!

The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended.

Hell begins the day that God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men.

To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world.