I think writers are very anxious.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

Changes is the mother of time. Absence of changes makes no time.

The bestway to diffuse an argument is to listen first, second, and last.

If good preaching could save the world, it would have been done long ago.

A few books, well studied, and thoroughly digested, nourish the understanding more than hundreds but gargled in the mouth, as ordinary students use.

If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.

Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason

Nobody can ever be fully prepared to deal with a new, painful situation. Sometimes I react with patience and sometimes I react by doing something impulsive. But I always learn from such experiences.

My grandfather gave me a watch. It doesn't have any hands or numbers. He says it's very accurate. I asked him what time it was. You can guess what he told me.

Our emotions Are only “incidents” In the effort to keep day and night together.

Arnold has had his spokesman call me a crackpot. That was a mistake.