I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven't made much progress there-though I need to.

Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn't live without.

No one's permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom {plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor}.

"You see, according to my experience, it is when you feel like you don't progress the most. »»

...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see...

This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious.

Because there is no adequate way of planning life or living it: only a lot of inappropriate ways. ""

then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don't think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will. So

Men are a strange breed.

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

when you're young your opponent is the future; but when you're not young, your opponent's the past and everything you've done in it and the problem of getting away from it.