“There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.”

“It is a bad thing to have love and nowhere to put it.”

“Oh, my goodness, said Louisiana. Im just all filled up with feathers and regrets. And fears. I have a lot of fears.”

“You can't always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

“Reader, do you think it is a terrible thing to hope when there is really no reason to hope at all? Or is it (as the soldier said about happiness) something that you might just as well do, since,in ...”

“And hope is like love...a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing.”

“Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one.”

“Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to ...”

“They say that it is always poets that die in wars, and I never got over a sense of being in the trenches.”

“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone...”

“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," a...”

“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean hell, I know that.”