When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.
The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature.
Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
It would have been very alarming - morally, and in other ways too - if an attack of that nature, the 11 September attacks, had not aroused in us and in our governments and societies the spirit of self-defence. If that had not been one of the responses it seems to me there would have been very grave cause for concern.
I do not care about titles, I am glad I have one now because nobody wanted to fight me, now they will.
The challenge is to just focus on what's actually happening, focus on the people who get it, and focus on the people who are listening.
One of the most adventurous things left us is to go to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams.