I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.
To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.
Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)
It's no sin to tell a good story.
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care the happiest, individual would not be either a man or a woman it; it would be, I think a cow.
We cannot find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a police officer.
Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate.