Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

That's what books are for... to travel without moving an inch.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

That the last two letters in her name were the first two in his, a silly thing he never mentioned to her but caused him to believe that they were bound together.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.

The field was wet, the lane was wet, and the spirits of my mechanic and helper were damp.

When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.

I've always enjoyed playing a little left of center characters. Otherwise I'd be on a soap opera.

What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll--a soft roll, not a hard roll--and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me.

A mature artist is at the same time aware of the futility of his achievement and the validity of the pursuit.

Men may die like lambs and yet have their place forever with the goats.

Smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates.

The beatings, the beatings were so normal to me. The abuse was just routine. I didn't wake up the next day and say, 'Dre, why did you hit me?' We never talked about it the next day. Never.