Life is a great surprise. I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don’t know each other very well.

I’ve always enjoyed studying the small clues that indicate a particular class level.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.

What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

I’m glad I’m successful at it, because it’s allowed me to live very well financially, and give my kids a lot of things. It’s enabled me to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t be able...

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.

The truth is, I could no more dictate her nature than she could dictate mine. Kinsey’s happy as she is and she doesn’t need to be rescued, improved, or saved.

No matter what you or anyone else does, there will be someone who says that there’s something bad about it.

I gave up on the big screen. The Witching Hour was at Warner Bros. for 10 years and it just didn’t work out.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

When I’m working on something, I proceed as if no one else will ever read it.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

Christian are not taken seriously in the secular media, generally, but if readers like your stuff, they don’t care about your roots.

The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Heaven knows, I’ve exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination… now my new book is about what really happened to me… not my heroines.

The tuba is certainly the most intestinal of instruments, the very lower bowel of music.

You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same...

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.

What is it they want from the man that they didn’t get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he’s done with his work, what’s any artist but the dregs...

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

The U.S. is by far the biggest exporter of arms in the world. It was true during the Clinton administration, and it’s true during the Bush administration. It’s bipartisan.

Obviously, a writer can’t know everything about what she writes. It’s impossible.

I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I’ll have used up all my characters, and then I’ll be free to get on with my real life.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.

There ain’t nothin’ to dyin’, really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

In my opinion, Jesus is God’s attempt to reach man. But while I believe Jesus is the way to God, it makes no sense to hate people who disagree.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Fossil finding will be a very difficult job on Mars. I don’t think robotic missions will do it. It will take astronauts and even then it will be a tough job.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives...

Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.

I read newspapers, textbooks on crime. I talk to private investigators, police officers, jail administrators, doctors, lawyers, career criminals.

There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don’t know everything about it. You can’t.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.

I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

Never have children, only grand children.

There is a comfort zone of knowing where things are going and having characters in place, but the action gets more and more dramatic and is very challenging to describe.