She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are.

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't.

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

Christy has not been given a fair shake. She has not been identified as a competent premier.

Look at resistances to change as a source of energy and where there is energy there is still passion and potential.

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women.

One doesn't have an agreement to that effect written down on parchment and sealed; but it is as well understood and ought to be as faithfully kept as any legal contract.

I'm an extremist, I have to deal with my own extreme personality, and I walk the fine line of wanting to die and wanting to be the ruler of it all.

Three things faith does: it reckons on God; it risks with God (and) it rests in God.

I like actors who just are who they are, with a little bit of qualification to adapt to their character. But mostly they just use their own personality to embody the character.

Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.

That's why you have to like a guy like Charles Manson. Say what you will about Manson - he's one of the only people with the decency to look like a dangerous maniac the first time you meet him.

When we talk about democracy, if the people's stomach is empty, democracy is also empty. Democracy can not be installed by fiat; it must be achieved by the people themselves.