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

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.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The truth is more important than the facts.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.

Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.

The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

Truth in science is always determined from observational facts.

I have fully cooperated with the investigation and before the grand jury, and I'm quite confident at the end of the day that we'll know what facts are in this particular case.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

Neither facts nor pictures seem to sink into our centers of feeling any more.

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever... and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.

Facts are, insurance ratings are really dependent on the notion that some people are higher risk than others.

To do so, we are creating a Fairness for Switzerland Committee that will not only disseminate some of the facts, but also protect a relationship that is important to all of us in North America.