Taste is one of the five senses, and the man who tells us with priggish pride that he does not care what he eats is merely boasting of his sad deficiency: he might as well be proud of being deaf or...

Knowing how to tactfully criticize someone's work is a mentor's job.

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Isaac Singer was born in Poland and doesn't write in English. Still, he's an American.

Each time a new disaster puts miners in the news, the press tries to make them into heroes, but they don't quite fit the bill. They don't march off to war or rush into burning buildings or rid our...

What I love about Indiana Jones is he always bites off slightly more than he can chew. The guy he's fighting is always slightly tougher than he is, but he just refuses to give up. And that's what...

The Cause of Women is generally the Cause of Virtue.

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I...

Here are a few of the actors who have brought my novels to TV life: Bill Pullman, Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Julian Sands, Gena Rowlands, Rob Lowe, Julia Ormond, Chelsea Hobbs, Tate Donovan,...

If they tell the police, the police will find out she was driving, and her career will be put into hell.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Honest people don't hide their deeds.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.