Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

I’ve worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don’t want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.

The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of...

When I’m forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it’s all I can do to refrain from attack.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would...

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

Moby Dick – that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that’s how my book begins, too, but I hadn’t noticed the parallel before, two characters...

I think the diversity of authors and readers is expanding, which is wonderful, because it means the type of story being told is also expanding.

Give that to me so I can get out of here.

In America, we no longer have an institutionalized, organized way of calling business to task – of taking them to account for what they’ve done – and this is especially true in the cultural realm.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.

Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

The great growling engine of change – technology.

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn’t long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we’ve got in this country.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn’t grow – with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There’s nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while...

I saw many aspects of the country which I needed to see in order that I might know what we need to do.

In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.

Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

No matter how nice the company one might be with, however, it is never pleasant to have a rifle pointed at one’s back.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

I don’t see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don’t believe in an eye for an eye. I don’t believe this is truly freedom.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?

Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!

Practice Golden-Rule 1 of Management in everything you do. Manage others the way you would like to be managed.

People were walking and they had formed the car pools. People were driving folks to work. Others were walking to work, where it wasn’t too far.

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

I’ve wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations – the atmospheric pressure, you might say – of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

I’m working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn’t possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I’ve tended to do most of my serious...

When we think of the state of the economy, we are not thinking in terms of money flow. We are thinking in terms of the effect on everyday lives of people.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener’s mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere...

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman – in spite of the fact that all three of them...

The object of the law of value is to elucidate the actual exchange relations of commodities.

Owning a home is a keystone of wealth… both financial affluence and emotional security.

Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything...

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?