When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

I aspire to be an old man with an old wife laughing at old jokes from a wild youth.

Once you decide to work for yourself, you never go back to work for somebody else.

I think I've been able to express some of the more complicated feelings I had.

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

My mom means a lot to me. My mom gave up everything. She moved with me and believed in me. She is awesome.

An honor is not diminished for being shared.

I was thinking about hitting races and stuff, but it's just, I think it's more of the era of when I was a kid and it just brings back memories. I gotta just chill and live in the past.

Why is the rest of the world so overcrowded? Nobody lives in America! We're all squashed up on top of each other in London.

Moshe Dayan, who donated his eye to CBS. Never got a dinner!

A society which denies the heart its role becomes, in very short order, a heartless society.