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.

We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it’s not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it’s how we interpret those events that will determine...

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

That’s where their office was, at the time, and talked with the manager about hiring two black drivers. He said he didn’t have any openings.

Australia is the most isolated continent.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King’s, and the other wasn’t selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King’s. But they...

Good humor isn’t a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.

I view the players as entertainers. Their job is to entertain you, and although an Arizona Cardinals game might not have that effect, most of them do.

Once serious political dialogue has begun, the international community can assume that we have achieved genuine progress along the road to real democratisation.

Tom and I are never in the same city long enough and both between books, so a further collaboration looks unlikely for some time.

Robert Benchley has a style that is weak and lies down frequently to rest.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It’s a devastating novel.

It is therefore utterly false to say that Marx revokes the law of value as far as individual commodities are concerned, and maintains it in force solely for the aggregate of these commodities.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can...

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents.

We can’t manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can’t start and stop ice ages, and we can’t experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

Probably all the books I’ve ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.

I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around.

Stereotypes involving Christian identity, Christian persecution is so far back in history now that no one fears it being revived, unless you live in China, I guess.

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That’s how I feel about it.

As far as the writing goes, I started telling stories as soon as I could talk, and started writing them down as soon as I could string words together.

12, 13, you still lost your virginity. I don’t care how old you were.

I think there’s great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.

We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Profits, like sausages… are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on...