The backbone of the preaching of Christ is a conviction of the truth of Christ.
I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole life, I mean. I can picture her when she was much younger than I am - because there are always gestures and expressions that are ingrained, ageless. An old woman doesn't see herself as an old woman, and neither do I. I try to see her her whole life in her. There's something so moving about someone's whole life.
Good habits are worth being fanatical about.
The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.
My life is a reading list.
I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
As ill-luck would have it.
I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure