How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

That's the way I remember them, heading for an exit.

Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

I've survived revolution, war, and over a decade on this continent, " the Burgrave reflected. "But by all the ghosts of the hundred emperors, I think fatherhood will finally do me in.

We are what ballads are written of, what bards sing of. We are epic, you and I.

Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.

I don't suppose there's really any critic except posterity.

He who blushes is already guilty.

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.

When you arrive at a certain level it's very easy to say yes: that is the moment to learn to say no.

Real change isn't measured with words, it is measured with real achievements.

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors.