The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.

And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

But as far as being popular, yeah, I think Dave Barry is really funny.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

We may freak out globally, but we suffer locally.

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

I was a late child from my parents, so I grew up surrounded by people a lot older than me. I think even when I was 21, I felt like I was a 70-year-old man.

I hate that word dysfunction.

I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

Nice people dont necessarily fall in love with nice people.

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact it was the only fact ... The family was the houses soul.

As with all forms of liberation, of which the liberation of women is only one example, it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Popularity has become its own justification.

The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.

Prosperity is the measure or touchstone of virtue, for it is less difficult to bear misfortune than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi.

Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

This bored fantastic woman, with her animal nature, giving herself the pleasure of seeing her enemy struck down, not a particularly keen one for her because she is so weary of having all her desires satisfied.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.

'Project Runway' was my guilty pleasure while my son was napping or nursing.

The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

The greatest pleasure of life is love.