It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

There is more light than darkness, there has always been.

And where does magic come from? I think that magic's in the learning.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism - it is an important part of promoting peace.

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from.

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

I think it's very, very tough to compare postseason and in-season, just for the simple fact that there's the heightened levels of energy on both sides of the ball.

In the hysterical technocracy of modern music, sorrow is sent to the back of the class where it sits, pissing its pants in mortal terror.

I have to work in England, but here in America you don't have to work. You can sort of enter the profession of being.

It's almost impossible to make the case that Bush is a conservative. That may be good; that may be bad.