If you can lie, you can act, and if you can lie to crazy girlfriends, you can act under pressure.
A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.
The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.
Only bad writers think they're good.
Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.
There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.
Allow the diversity to exist. There is nothing wrong with it. Hell, we put up with the religious right-we can put up with transgendered human beings.
When you go to Africa and you see people who are just like you and me - this is always my starting point. These are people who are just like you and me. The same synapses, same things are firing off in their heads, same dreams for their children, same hopes and aspirations that we all have. What can one do to reduce the possibility that their chances of a happy and healthy and prosperous life are not solely determined by the accident of where they were born?
I think that people have expectations of themselves and other people that are based on these fictions that are presented to them as the way human life and relationships could be, in some sort of weird, ideal world, but they never are. So you're constantly being shown this garbage and you can't get there.
After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, 'No hablo ingles. '