Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

What the artist wishes to do — as far as you are concerned — is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

You can't fly by staring at the sky. You have to take a risk to grow wings of imagination and fly.

Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.

K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.

What is necessary is to rectify names.

I'm proud of my Native American heritage.

Some must follow and some command, through all are made oclay.

Anytime you want to lay off the paybacks God, that'd be great.

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention. When we love another person we give him or her our attention; we attend to that person's growth.

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

The MacGuffin in that [Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story] was [Bill] Clinton staying in office. That's what he wanted, and the media was hell-bent that he was gonna get what he wanted.