The only thing worse for smoking than drinking is quitting drinking. Because then it's the only thing you can do.

I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

The most interesting things that happen in my books are usually the things that arise spontaneously, the things that surprise me.

Conversations sometimes are so hard to follow.People are so confusing with the wrong facialexpressions for their words.

Beware the fury of a patient man.

Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings.

Imagine a vast ocean. Feel that you are part of that ocean. Imagine that each wave in the ocean is slowly moving through you. Feel that each wave is a wave of joy.

There was not a word of apology, not a word of explanation to the American people. The president's going to have to get a touch of reality.

People are working hard in the USA to make things. And I want to help them do it even more.

Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

A U.S. dollar is an IOU from the Federal Reserve Bank. It's a promissory note that doesn't actually promise anything. It's not backed by gold or silver.

I know I can get to the stage where I'm drinking a lot. I tend to be rotten and groggy all day and hanging out for the next drink and five o'clock, ping! I have to just stop.