The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes cant even hear crickets chirping.

After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

The whisper of the dusk is night shedding its husk.

For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.

I have more self-doubt than any writer I've ever known.... The positive aspect of self-doubt - if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it - is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image.