Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.

The realization that my parents, too, felt pain and fear frightened me more than any strangers could.

Music, I'd heard him say, was like dessert. He could live without it, but life just wasn't as good.

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

...I knew in the end the guilt of one side did not prove the innocence of the other.

Serenity of mind brings joy and happiness in life.

He lies to himself. If Eugenides talked in his sleep, he'd lie then, too.

You can change the world with a hot bath, if you sink into it from a place of knowing that you are worth profound care, even when you're dirty and rattled.

I take issue with many people's description of people being illegal Immigrants. There aren't any illegal Human Beings as far as I'm concerned.

Our task is not to make societies safe for globalization, but to make the global system safe for decent societies.

If you create a new party... to try to deny the communist party leadership, then not be allowed to exist.

How my relationship with my parents influenced my writing, really not at all. My dad was a mechanic, my mom a nurse.

And it was under Wilson that the first great propaganda slogan was coined and emblazoned everywhere, to make Americans start thinking favorably of democracies and forget that we had a republic.

Remember that the stock market is manic-depressive.

I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.