They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side. . . He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
Conscience is better served by a myth.
Aim at perfection and nothing less. Need the best. Deserve the best. Those who say it's not possible are the people who decided to settle.
A fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Pressure to produce over the short term - a gun to the head of everyone - encourages excessive risk taking which manifests itself in several ways - fully invested posture at all times, the use of leverage, and a market centric orientation that makes it difficult to stand apart from the crowd and take a long term perspective.