My only obligation as a fiction writer is to the story, to make it good, so good the busy reader doesn't feel that flipping those pages was a waste of time. And I still believe that.

That's the problem with revealing true truths. They make people uncomfortable. The truth should be grand and exotic, but mostly it isn't. Mostly it's uncomfortable.

No one cares about the art of the lie at this point. They insist on impressing with the truth. See me! Look at me! Look at who I am! Look at who I want you to think I am!

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

Dressing up. People just don't do it anymore. We have to change that.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

The revolution cannot be funded. It's not the imagination of trusts and foundations that's going to bring real change.

The process of the body changing and making a whole human fascinates me.

Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

It is important to remember that we are energy. Einstein told us that. And energy cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form.

I looked around at us all: me in my nightgown, Kiyo bare-chested, Dorian in his extravagant robes, and Tim in his Native getup. God, I muttered, standing up, we all look like the village people.

Almost anything can be dealt with if people are of good will and light hearts and strong values.

If the depths of everyone's sin was made public, we would all be much more gracious to each other.