What good's a captive without her captor?

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.

Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

Bury me on my face," said Diogenes; and when he was asked why, he replied, "Because in a little while everything will be turned upside down.

I wake up every morning excited. Rather than become complacent or overwhelmed, I've made a choice for life - and I can do something about it.

Tennessee Williams was a gifted talker with a beautiful accent and we had lots of things in common.

The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

Alone time is when I distance myself from the voices of the world so I can hear my own.

I love to play real people... good people that I know the audience will get behind. It's the good people in the world that I gravitate to.

My music is always called "cerebral." It is a way of saying I'm Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.