“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other. We found each other in the dark.

Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You, you fill me up.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.

If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

All of my books deal in a very rough, rude fashion with subjects about which there are great conflicts of opinion.

Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by asserting: Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.