Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.

Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

Don't be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

Bureaucracies are designed to perform public business. But as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy.

Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Say "Yes" to the seedlings and a giant forest cleaves the sky. Say "Yes" to the universe and the planets become your neighbors. Say "Yes" to dreams of love and freedom. It is the password to utopia.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.

I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good.

American diversity rarely applies to money and success.

An atheist waving a cross at a vampire was a truly pitiful sight.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

Lord Salisbury and myself have brought you back peace--but a peace I hope with honour.

. . . don't rewrite unless you know what you're trying to do.

When I'm inside the character, I feel like I'm a different person, and then when you see that character on screen and I see that it's me, I find that disappointing.

What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.

One hour three times per week in the gym is no counterbalance to all of the other behavior in those other 165 hours

...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.