knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

While liberals had embraced Obama as someone who had left-wing progressive ideas, the truth is that by personality he's a very incremental guy.

Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.