I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.
Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.
Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal. . . unless she's really attractive.
Words, living and ghostly, the quick and the dead, crowd and jostle the otherwise too empty corridors of my mind. . . To move among this bright, strange, often fabulous herd of beings, to summon them at my will, to fasten them on to paper like flies, that they may decorate it, this is the pleasure of writing.
It well becomes a young man to be modest.
The president [Barack Obama] decided to leave more troops than he had originally planned in Afghanistan. We have a very cooperative government there, with Ashraf Ghani and his top - his top partner, Abdullah. And they are doing their very best. And the Afghan army is actually fighting. The Afghan army is taking heavy losses defending Afghan territory.
Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air.
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.