When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

Pistachio nuts, the red ones, cure any problem.

I want to keep meeting new people, enlarging my circle of friends. I have great friends now... really good people. But I'm always ready for what comes next

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them

We spend our whole lives recovering from high school.

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.

Sometimes it's easier to show than it is to tell

Mistakes are growth, and we learn not to do it again. But it doesn't make you a terrible person. That's important to me.

Now the only way you can serve God on earth is by serving others.

If you cannot saw with a file or file with a saw, then you will be no good as an experimentalist.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

As an artist I'd choose the thing that's beautiful more than the one that's true.

You ever try to go a day without judgment?

The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

I believe that anyone using the phrase 'That's so cool' should have to stand in the corner.