A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another.

Oracle of Delphi:In my deep mystery I breatheyour fragrance swirling inyour odourless soulI return your mysteryrevealing your destiny deep inthe seed of your God Self

Each of us has a spark of life inside us and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that spark in one another.

A man doesn't need a study to know if he's feeling amorous. There is no such thing as a placebo erection.

Laughter means: taking a mischievous delight in someone else's uneasiness, but with a good conscience.

Stop Learning and start thinking.

If you go out and watch nature closely, you will find something so joyful that it will completely fill you.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

I guess some of us are just born with Tragedy in our blood

Certainly there are various trans-Islamic political movements, which try to appeal to Muslims in all societies.