I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I wasn’t going to shy away from getting married when I did and having a baby young and starting a family, even with the job that I chose.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

My next baby will be my new record.

Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

I am completely fascinated by the differences and comparisons between real life and fairy tales because we’re raised as little girls to think that we’re a princess and that Prince Charming is going to sweep us off our feet.

To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That’s why I don’t listen to anything that’s anonymous. But it’s hard; when there’s something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.

Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they’re already asleep.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Be not a slave of words.

I don’t let a lot of reporters meet my children.

My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids.

You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‚mom-in-chief.‘ My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I understand the importance of bondage between parent and child.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

In honorable dealing you should consider what you intended, not what you said or thought.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.