“The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime”

We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

You see in others who you are.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’

I don’t pay any attention to what the Baltimore Sun editorial page says about anything.

I come around to your house personally and wet your finger while you’re turning the pages.

After the Democrats shoved the 2700 pages of ObamaCare down our throats – and we did find out how expensive, controlling, and coercive the legislation was – a majority of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to toss it aside as unconstitutional.

I’ve never read a kayak manual, but I’m pretty sure page one says ‘Use in water.’

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn’t invite reflection as much as the printed page.

When you go to a great concert something that happens is there is a deep sense of communality and connectedness one to another – as though we are all looking to eachother and saying yeah, we get it, we’re all on one page.

Indians were here first – it’s about time. We’re way behind the African Americans and Hispanic Americans in getting politically involved, but we’re beginning to take a page out of their notebook.

When good news about the market hits the front page of the New York Times, sell.