“If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.”

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.

As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.

I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.

The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Continents of memory had been lost.

Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.

After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.

I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.

What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.

I don’t know what DVD commentaries are about. I’d like to strangle the person who came up with that concept.

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.