I enjoyed the “people” aspect of sales, but the haggling, the rinding, the tedium… thanks, but I’ll keep on writing if I’m permitted.

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.

Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.

The idea that you are a writer because you’re published is also a lie.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks… of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.

Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans.

Love… Force it and it disappears. You cannot will love, nor even control it. You can only guide its expression. It comes or it goes according to those qualities in life that invite it or...

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy...

I was very touched, pleased and at the same time rather saddened by how sensitive the young people are to the need to build up a future.

I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I’m always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just...

Clean up your own mess.