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" A child's mind is its living room; it's going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence. "

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" I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.' "

" Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. "

" A lot of my work comes from what in Asia is called the 'mind of wonder.' There is not a lot of 'mind of wonder' writing in contemporary Western literature. I think that's what appeals to the readers who are my fans. "

" Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently. "

" If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering. "

" In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury. "

" If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it. "

" To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought. "

" The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being. "

" To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen. "

" When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle. "

" People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. "

" There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven. "

" Usually, autobiography is such an indulgence of the ego. "

" When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. "

" The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don't do a lot of reading anymore except on tape. "

" Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. "

" The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.' "

" Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine. "

" John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?' "

" Education is for growth and fulfillment. "

" Most novelists write about twisted lives. "

" Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom. "

" I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends. "

" We use so much bad language that it forms a barrier between ourselves and the truth. "

" The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce. "

" In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable. "

" I am cheerful. I don't know if I'm happy. There is a difference, you know. "

" True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. "

" What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy. "