My dear boy, please don’t put a label on me – don’t make me a category before you get to know me!
All his life he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything more, nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so complete.
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
It’s a no-win argument – that business of what we’re born with and what our environment does to us. And it’s a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth.
You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.
Imagining something is better than remembering something.
Never confuse faith, or belief – of any kind – with something even remotely intellectual.
The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
Being afraid you’ll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.
All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it’s still going to be a comic novel.
We are formed by what we desire.
It is your responsibility to find fault with me, it is mine to hear you out. But don’t expect me to change.
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.
Half my life is an act of revision.