“Without writing, I sometimes suspect there would be no such thing as love.”

“If we have nothing to write about but nothing to write about, then that is what we have to write about.”

“We can only re-tell stories; we attempt, in doing so, to tell new stories. Is there a way out of this bind? I think the trick is to enter into it completely. Avoid purity. The idea of perfection sounds awfully boring.”

“History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?”

“In a life, in any life, bad things happen. Many good things happen, of course, we know what they are-joy, tenderness, success beauty-but some bad things happen as well. Sometimes, very bad things happen. Children sicken and die. People we love don't love us, can never love us.”

“The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”

“Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till I met a computer with a sense of humor.”