We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Everything in the world had happened to them and kept on happening. They didn't care. They liked it that way.

All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.

The first thing a writer has to do is find a new source of income.

One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old.

Work is the thing that stays. Work is the thing that sees us through.

Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does.

Don't ruin the present with the ruined past.

At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do.

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.

My main home is in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a college town in the Ozark Mountains. I live on the highest hill in a quiet cul-de-sac, surrounded by friends.

I'd know if I wasn't fully human, wouldn't I? Wouldn't there be some sort of sign, pointed ears or wings or something like that?--Meghan Chase

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

No one can take advantage of you without your permission.

It's just like I get this identity crisis: my body doesn't want to write, my mind doesn't want to write. Nothing about me wants to write, but I force myself to sit there and try. Nothing happens.

Labour leaders lead us all, though we know they bleed us all. Cheer our new Decline and Fall, Gibbon might have dreamed it all.

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.

Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

I do not feel betrayed. ... He has a fine record. He is a national hero. (On Oliver L North's work)

There are two ways love can go. You can be good to each other or you could not play fair.

I'm going to miss Blockbuster. I'm gonna miss being CEO and all that stuff. We had an atmosphere where everybody was happy. When people make money, they're happy.