Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a...

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.

Extreme law is often extreme injustice.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an 'ethic.'

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

When I write, I can shake off all my cares.

You make 'em, I amuse 'em.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.

To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.