“We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.”

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.

The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good.

I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive.

There’s no real template to follow these days for what a band should and shouldn’t be – bands are just becoming these weird little Internet avatars that you either follow or download or interact with in some removed way.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Everybody was going on about it, so mom started hounding me more.

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information.

You should *have* an experience; it shouldn’t just *be* an experience.

I think we should give them all the credit in the world. They want to know the truth.