You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

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.

Embrace wisdom and relentlessly pursue joy, and you can live agelessly.

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

To understand and be understood is to be at peace

Was this what humans were really like? They seemed like drooling idiots to me. I was shocked they walk and breathe at the same time?

Get moving; the more ground you cover, the more people you see, the more successful you will be.

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core. Without them, we are empty.

Heaven hath many tongues to talk of it, more eyes to behold it, but few hearts that rightly affect it.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

A faithful friend is the true image of the Deity.

A vision, without a plan, is just a hallucination.