"Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated."

"Memoir is the art of inventing the truth."

"Good writing is lean and confident."

"You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into entertainment."

"Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good."

"I've never heard anybody smile."

"People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like."

"Probably the finest travel book ever written by an American is Walden, though Thoreau only went a mile out of town."

"Be a writer. Write things down."

"My roster of the new literature, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing new information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity."

"Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal."

"If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for."

"If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway."

"Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation."

"The writer who cares about usage must always know the quick from the dead."

"You are writing for yourself."

"Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe."

"A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing."

"It's a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon "launder" became a dirty word."

"Good writers are visible just behind their words."

"Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author."

"We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."

"Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do."

"All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem."

"Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there."

"Writing is thinking on paper, or talking to someone on paper. If you can think clearly, or if you can talk to someone about the things you know and care about, you can write - with confidence and enjoyment."

"This is a book by a writer who does some teaching, not a book by a teacher who does some writing, and one of the satisfactions of the craft is that there's always something new to learn."

"Bobby asked him what it was like to be insane. “There is nothing that being insane is like,” Rupert replied."

"Oh, Robespierre, Robespierre, was the triumph of inadvertence over intention ever so total?"

"Don’t bring your petty little human perspective to the matter, Dr. Onslo. To a vulture, carrion tastes like chocolate cake."

"“Love Jesus, embrace your inner storm trooper, and leave the planet a more miserable place than you found it—that’s Christian nihilism in a nutshell,” said Whip Hemsoth. “If there’s a better path to fulfilling your purpose and engorging your wedding member, I haven’t found it.”"

"Monotheism is just one of the myths by which we live, and Yahweh is just one of the deities who populate these stories."

"There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain."

"My friends in the nouveau paganism camp accuse me of quaintness: Bible thumpers are straw men, so why bother?...My answer is that straw men, once set aflame with zeal, can be quite dangerous, and that the gap between New Age irrationalism and Christian fundamentalism is not nearly so wide as we might wish to believe."

"When I destroyed my unwanted children, it was murder. When Yahweh did the same, it was eugenics. Do you approve of the universe, Ham?"

"Being God, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it."

"If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You."

"I’ve gone insane, Michael decided, retrieving a cowhide-bound appointments book from his valise. Only certifiable schizophrenics showed meetings with God on their calendars."

"“If Western Europe and the United States committed seven billion dollars annually to the cause of clean drinking water worldwide, that investment would save four thousand lives a day”... “Seven billion dollars. That’s less than what Europeans spend each year for perfume and Americans for cosmetic surgery. Before he went to the gallows, Enoch Anthem spoke often about Christ turning water into wine, but he never once implored Christendom to turn perfume into water.”"

"Imagine that a team of neuroscientists has just unveiled a technology that lets a person remove all trace of some terrible experience from his brain. Under what conditions, if any, would you use it? What might it be like to go through life knowing you’d once suffered an ordeal so dreadful that it demanded radical excision? How long could you endure this strange affirmative ignorance, this lost access to the unspeakable, without becoming neurotic, or even slightly mad? In the long run, might you not decide that such circumscribed amnesia was worse than whatever memory you’d felt compelled to erase?"

"The real reason Charles Darwin distresses people, I would argue, is not that he stumbled on an argument against theism. No, the problem was that he replaced theism—replaced it with a construct more beautiful and majestic than any account of the Supreme Being outside the Book of Job, a construct that invites us to see every variety of life, from aphids to archbishops, zygotes to zoologists, as vibrant threads in an epic tapestry, its warp and woof stretching across the eons and back to the Precambrian ooze, the seminal sea-vents, the primordial clay-pits, or wherever it all began. An astonishing construct, a mind-boggling construct, a construct of which Jehovah is understandably and insanely jealous."

"“A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.” “Golden ages rarely return,” I said “especially if they never existed.”"

"“Your disciples will expect something even grander from you. They’ll want you to become a deity.” She snickered and said, “I’m not ruling out that possibility.” “What sort of deity? A hamadryad? Plato’s demiurge? The Creator God of Judeo-Christian revelation?” “That job’s already taken,” she said. “But you could do it better,” I said. “When it comes to the physics, no, but in other areas—you’re right.”"

"“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”"

"What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever."

"I shall never cease to marvel at the clarity of stars when viewed from midocean, each as sharp and bright as the laser pointer God uses when lecturing the angels on evolution."

"“It’s an old story, perhaps the oldest on earth,” Joan said. “The sky rumbles, the clouds congeal, the sun spasms. Is that a saint I see on high? An angel? The Lord God Jehovah himself? Now a holy voice booms down, instructing the poor prophet to grab a sword and thrust it into a fellow human, or perhaps a hundred fellow humans, or even a million if the cause is sufficiently sacred. The prophet never talks back. The tradition existed before me. It flourishes to this day. The sword, the blood, the freshly created corpses littering the battlefield, exuding the stink of epiphany.”"

"Many are the consolations of literature, and not the least such solace occurs when an annoyingly virtuous hero succumbs to carnal temptation."

"Recent biblical exegesis by Anthem’s newest organization, Hermeneutics Unlimited, had established beyond doubt that Jesus Christ was adamantly opposed to universal health-care insurance, class-action lawsuits, and corporate whistleblowers. Several prominent postrationalist theologians had successfully exposed public education for the misguided Marxist boondoggle it was, while a majority in Congress now advocated replacing the secular school system with private academies committed to sparing children the bad news that Charles Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands."