They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

Diversity does not simply mean the color of ones akin.

An opportunity to honor the legacy of the lives drawn into the lines in my face, the broad of my nose, the dark of my eyes, the fullness of my lips, and coal in my complexion.

In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god.

I really hate heights. I always like to live on the first floor.

I need you to pray for me; I need you to care for me. I need you to want me to win. I need to know where I'm heading, because I know where I've been.

You ever taste some damn chicken so horrible, that you wished the chicken would show up at your house and show your lady how to cook him?

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.

Learning from other people is what music is all about.

There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world

Of all the creatures on this planet none is more dangerous than a human being.