I also understand that you have to lie to yourself to survive in a bad marriage, you have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

She felt the intimate loss of who was meant to become.

The receding perspective of my past smothers my present. Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

We rarely consider that we're also formed by the decisions we didn't make, by events that could have happened but didn't, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

He may be my half brother, but we're not related. A chasm of incommunicable worlds lies between us.

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

Don’t be the person who has an overflowing cup of knowledge but an inactive state of action. That serves no-one, that serves no purpose.

She was a dark, unenduring little flower - yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

We must take the time to do what needs to be done now, what is right, instead of passing a bad bill.

All art is advertising. It stands for a particular point of view. Art that exploits badness is advertising badness.

If You Cannot Protect What You Own, You Don’t Own Anything!

Non-proliferation will only work if all states are willing to cooperate, and that will only happen if all feel they are being treated fairly.

I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen.

Traditionally parents have wondered what their teens were doing, but now teens are much more likely to be doing things that can get them killed.

I mean always had a lot of self-confidence.