Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

I can remember saying again and again and again, "A terrible thing has happened, but this should be a kind of wake-up call for our country, and we have a great opportunity now to reinvent ourselves. To rethink our position about oil and energy, to rethink our relationship with other cultures and other countries, and why other people want to attack us."

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.