I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Again and again I will suffer

That's the point of words. They get around.

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

In order to understand the impact you can have on another's life by listening you need to first be intimate with the experience of being heard.

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.

I never tried to stage, to fabricate an image.

A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display.

So softly death succeeded life in her, She did but dream of heaven, and she was there.

Good thoughts keep off bad thoughts. They must themselves disappear before the state of realization.

I think that in the last twenty years or so, there's been a new kind of honesty in painting where painters have been very proud of paint and have let it behave openly.