Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.

Books are like movies of the mind and it’s better to leave Kinsey where she is.

I met an American woman and got married so I had to get a job.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.

I’m definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there’s no doubt about that.

The world doesn’t need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they’d be good at.

To teach one’s self is to be forced to learn twice.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

People are scared to death and they’re looking for something beyond themselves.

And I don’t want to begin something, I don’t want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place,...

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us.

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.

I’ve never written about my husband, Steve, or any of my children because I know them all too well. I see them in all their complexities which makes them impossible to render on the printed...

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle.

I broke with my religion in college.

While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I’m going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.

Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

I think all fiction should be fair game for the Christian market, except porn, of course.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

You don’t want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven’t done what I do. Most book reviewers haven’t written 11...

Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up.

Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it’s not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

Invest in a feather duster – the possibilities are endless.

For me, writing something down was the only road out.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.

I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?

I fear it’s because religion is man’s attempt to reach God, and when he feels he has succeeded, he cannot abide anyone else’s claim to have done the same.

It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you...

On the one hand, shopping is dependable: You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it’s instant gratification and yet something you...

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

I passed the Bar on the first shot, But I have never practiced law.

I love being a writer, what I can’t stand is the paperwork.

We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.

There may be writing groups where people meet but it’s occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?