She extended a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

They reciprocated the great and saving lie--that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things--willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life.

There are more obese people in the world than starving people. As China and India start to develop our eating habits - and not by accident but because agribusiness is going over there and imposing our habits on them - if the population doesn't increase at all, we'll have to raise twice as many animals as we do.

One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.