No one could have fathomed what a life he’d led, for it was chiefly a life lived in his mind.
A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy.
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
Patriotism is not necessarily defined as blind devotion to a president’s particular agenda – and that to dispute a presidential policy is not necessarily anti-American.
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.
The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.
Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
There’s a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There’s a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.
I’m not a movie person. They’re collaborations of the worst kind. You must compromise yourself to many interests that are venal and crass and do not have your best interests at heart.
This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.
Adolescence-is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?
The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable – some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.
A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
Kids are beautiful, man. And they know much more than grownups think they know. Kids are just perfect people until grownups get their hands on them.
I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.