When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on...

Divorce is the one human tragedy that reduces everything to cash.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the...

I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.

I haven't got the patience for small talk, although I once saw a woman standing on her own in the corner, and I realised it was Monica Lewinsky, and I had the nicest evening with her - she was...

As the idealized mother, I might choose Irene Dunne as the mother in 'I Remember Mama' who strives and not just cooks and scrubs for her children, but who also acts as her daughter's literary agent.

My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.

Ireland starts for me with the end of 'The Dead,' which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

My name is Bruce Feiler, and I'm an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It's the incurable desire to...

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is...

We're sort of in an age now when we have too much information, which can take us down a specific path. You're getting too much information too quickly to be able to slow it down and parse it out.

The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling.

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

I think there is a general unrest or curiosity about what a human future is going to be like, and whether the way we're living is even sustainable.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a...

In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.

When poverty shows itself, even mischievous boys understand what it means.

Of what use are all the codes in the world, if by means of confidential reports, if for trifling reasons, if through anonymous traitors any honest citizen may be exiled or banished without a hearing,...

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they...

Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.

I have lived poverty. I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain, and rage.

Just when you're beginning to think pretty well of people, you run across somebody who puts sugar on sliced tomatoes.

I am a criminal. Coming to terms with this aspect of my identity has helped me to see more clearly - with blinders off - the ways in which I have been encouraged not to feel any connection to 'them,'...

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

The more I see of men the more I like dogs.

Burglars know there's more than one way to skin a vault.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the...