Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.

It is not how much you love someone, but who you are when you are with him.

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

People always call it luck when you've acted more sensibly than they have.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

if someone dies, people say that they loved him even if he was not good person so they start cunning to his family as if he will know it, why don't you keep your mandibles off?

You're being parental', I said. 'Go find that squid'.

Success is not random.

I got the chance to argue my first case in Supreme Court, a criminal case arising in Alabama that involved the right of a defendant to counsel at a critical stage in a capital case before a trial.

Subconscious minds are no less fallible than the objective mind.

Life is perception. We perceive through different parts of the body of the universe.

Great power often corrupts virtue; it invariably renders vice more malignant. . . . In proportion as the powers of government increase, both its own character and that of the people becomes worse.

A crisis unmasks everyone.

The umpire... is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.

Never put off your massage until tomorrow if you can get it today.