If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

Paul Ryan's just a really, deeply evil little creature. But he's not little; he's actually quite tall, I'm sorry to see. I'm always sorry when really bad guys are tall.

I started reading literature at 17 or 18, and I felt this extra beat to life.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

I think that's the thing that memoir can do more than anything it does; it testifies and bears witness to the existence of people whose lives, pleasures and virtues would never have been testified to without my having done it. That makes me really glad.