When it came to formal classes, I was a slacker. But I’ve always been a diligent autodidact and can teach myself virtually any subject if I have a serious interest in it.
As much as I’ve produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn’t that – because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.
Those who wish to punish the current and future generations for the inequities of a generation long gone, and who equate justice with revenge, are the most dangerous people in the world.
I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don’t want to be an enabler, sir. I’d rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.
Doubt is poison. It leads to a loss of faith in yourself, and in all that’s good and true.
His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.
He is different, and there will be many people you love who will be unhappy with you. You don’t want them to feel you’ve dishonored them. Yes, I know how it is. But life is short. A chance for great happiness doesn’t come along all that often.
I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.
No, if there’s any ultimate redemption, it would be because I passed though your life without scarring you, and did not diminish who you are.
I think it’s perfectly just to refuse service to anyone based on behavior, but not based on race or religion.
When I’m in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you’re putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you’re creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.
We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness.
We’re out of cocktail olives, it’s a tragedy of historic proportions, but we’re coping because we’re Americans.
When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.
We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which we must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness and despair.
I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.
What popped up more than that was the realization that I made as an adult that the world is this incredibly complex, layered, and mysterious place and if you stop and think about it the human cell is literally more complex than a fleet of 747s.
It will all be better in the end and if it is not better then it must not be the end yet.
No one can tell you what your heart should feel.
The process, not the final achievement, is what it’s all about.