The only way to security for Israel and a humane life for Palestinians in their own land is political. No matter where the fault for past negotiating failures lies, there is no other path.
I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.
Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.
Everything has the potential to be extraordinary, whether an old photograph, a book or a life. If you find it ordinary, you simply need to take a closer look.
People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.
As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.
I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.
I have these new policies toward my life, like 'I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'
I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.
My whole life I've been an over-giver. My general operating policy has always been, 'If it belongs to me, don't worry: You can have it!'
I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.
I love the comfort of daily life's routines: things like being able to read a paper on the subway. It's no accident that my favourite word is 'quotidian.'
The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.
I applied for a job at 'The New York Times' many years ago, and felt correctly that my life depended on it.
The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.
Jill Clayburgh's life so closely paralleled mine, I feel as though a part of me lived a little through her and died a little with her.
Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
