“If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.”

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

No one ever expects poetry to sell…

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.

The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.

The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.

Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Most great entrepreneurs I know are nothing like the other kids. They’re almost like tangent lines – those lines that seem to go nowhere. Nothing connects them, until they get out in the real world. Then they connect just fine.

My goal is to help elect not only the first but second woman president. That will be real progress. I believe our next presidential election will see women at the top of the ticket for both parties.

When you don’t get what you want, it just makes you accept real life.

You are honest enough by nature to be able to see and judge your own self clearly – and that is a great thing.

Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions.

A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.

The real way to gain happiness is to give it to others.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.