Fear and hope are alike underneath.

There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.

It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

Fear and hope are alike underneath.

America beats on you so hard the whole time. You are constantly being pummeled by other people's rights and their sense of patriotism.

Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

I don't hate children. My wife and I just didn't think we would be good parents, and also by the time we got married in 1968, we were pretty nose-down toward what we wanted to do, and having a child was going to be an excuse to fail.

I had a Tourette's period. And obsessive compulsive disorder. Things would get in my brain that I couldn't get out of my brain.

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

I think once you love somebody, you love somebody; that's just how it is.

I work really hard at these books, and when colleagues write nasty reviews of them, I take it very personally.

I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.

The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

Well, I believe in the idea of 'normal' in the way that I believe in the idea of logic. Or the idea of character. All of these ethical constructs are just that: constructs.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

Your father has to die, better he dies in your arms.

She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

We are past the end of things now, but I don't want to leave.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

People react to fear, not love; they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Democracy is stronger than terrorism, and we will not cower to the terrorists' campaign of fear.

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

I don't fear death because I don't fear anything I don't understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.

Right out of high school I never had the fear of getting beat, which is how most people lose.

Who sows fear, reaps weapons.

For any new technology there is always controversy and there always some fear associated with it. I think that's just the price of being first sometimes.

Knight without fear and without reproach.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

My greatest fear is to be misunderstood.

I'll think, If this is his first punch, how are the others gonna feel? That's the only fear I have for myself.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.

That was my fear, which is why when I was took over a book, I was always trying to tweak it a little bit so that it looked like I was trying to add something instead of keeping the status quo.

You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.