And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

What separates a weak dreamer and a great dreamer is who is wishing and waiting or who is willing and working.

Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place.

It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

My first girlfriend, when I was about 18, was a fashion designer, and my sister was a fashion designer as well. I've always been into shopping, and I've always been very aesthetic, in a sense.

I'm neither Republican nor Democrat. I've worked for the past five administrations.

Sovereignty and the right to rule cannot be conferred on anyone no matter who ... as a result of an academic discussion. Sovereignty is acquired by force and power and violence.

You'll always know more in the future than you know now.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.