My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon it recedes as you approach.

Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.

I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.

When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

Just because you will not see the work completed does not mean you are free not to take it up.

See Spot run!' is a perfect sentence in some ways. But I doubt the critics would say it was.

A lot of my books have been that way. My World War II thriller about Sarin gas [Black Cross] was published two months before the Sarin attack in the Japanese subway. There are very weird coincidences out there. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write, because of my fear someone will carry it out.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.