As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

There is room in history for all of us.

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.

How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

You will reap tomorrow what you are sowing today

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

Nightmares are at all times better than real life

Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least, you will by such conduct, stand the best chance for such consequences.

Anyone I think who - that would go through a cancer ward and would see the result of what smoking does, would never, ever think of smoking is sexy again.

Secrets. I can't take then with me. If I do, when I go, when I arrive at my final destination, I'll be . . . impure.

The best of all teachers is the one who helps people so that eventually they don't need him.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

Every new discovery of science is a further 'revelation' of the order which God has built into His universe.