Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

What you today perceive as beautiful and special, over time, becomes not so special. That’s how the human brain works.

I never felt comfortable about my looks until I married Reed Vreeland. I believe in love at first sight because that's what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry.

Of course she is a fool, but so are all girls.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

Old and young disbelieve one another's truths.

Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person.

No one is talking about restructuring Social Security or Medicare for current retirees or for those that are near retirement. For those under 55, the answer is let's talk about it.

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

I hate perception. There's far too much of it in football