If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you.

Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

I don't give a damn what people think.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

Only little boys and old men sneer at love.

A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.

The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life?

There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance.

Great lovers have made great sacrifices.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

There is an element of seduction in shoes that doesn't exist for men. A woman can be sexy, charming, witty or shy with her shoes.

From age 16, I lived and breathed wine. I read every magazine and book about wine.

The factories were heavily bombed, but practically the construction work had been redone very quickly.

The book is so rich and yet it is well done. A rare achievement indeed!

There is no hope for television by means of cathode-ray tubes.

It's a shame we can't just admit that we failed family living, sell the house, split up the money, and get on with our lives.

I was instructed by people in higher rank to stand there and hold this leash and look at the camera. We were doing what we were told.

Watching children grow up, you learn a lot about life and about being a better person - you learn a lot about what's really important in the world and what isn't.

She was a thin woman in a mustard-yellow suit, with a yellowish complexion, short-cropped rusty red hair, and a stiff posture. She reminded Reynie of a giant walking pencil.