People didn't think animals thought or remembered or had minds! They most certainly do: any pet owner knows more than a lot of scientists about animals.

Day by day, I'm kind of a bore.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

The ways in which people treat animals will be reflected in how people relate to one another.

Glenn's 1962 Mercury flight was fraught with dramatics, from his 'Zero G and I feel fine!' exultation upon entering orbit to his reentry with what was feared was a faulty heat shield. After he safely...

A woman's life is not perfect or whole till she has added herself to a husband. Nor is a man's life perfect or whole till he has added to himself a wife.

If my characters travel somewhere, I generally write about a place I know to give the scenes more authenticity.

Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for...

'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated,...

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

I believe that this is the key, the principle itself is the key to conservatism. Because in many ways if you do not have a principled base you do not have policy and if you do not have policy in many...

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

You can't control how things that you're involved with are received. But 'The Thick of It' wasn't intended as an instruction manual. Writers like hearing how bits of this stuff have got out into the...

If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for...

Mr. Trump is primarily a television personality. As such, he is judged by that standard. This means that a scandal does not call forth a response; it calls forth the desire for a bigger scandal.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Never was a faithful prayer lost. Some prayers have a longer voyage than others, but then they return with their richer lading at last, so that the praying soul is a gainer by waiting for an answer.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

PR and marketing doesn't sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages.

I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control.

I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about...

The Longstockings are eight children's and young adult writers. We all came out of the New School MFA program, and we meet regularly to critique each other's work.

There is no one thing that can turn around a rejection. But there is one answer: begin talking to your customers who have already bought from you and discover why they bought.

The problem is that the U.S. government is the biggest debtor in the world, and those depending on it to take care of them will only become poorer.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I...

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

Change is hard but inevitable.

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of...

I know that all cops are not sterling characters. But you have to have someone to root for. I balance it with rotten cops who will take a bribe, who will beat somebody up.