It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

By the hairy balls of Jesus

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.

A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches

I hate using the word coagulant.

Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?

to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.

I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political views, or views in general. You want the market to work in the way the market works.

I don't think people realize that what we eat and your stress levels impact the way that you look. Not just your body, but your face and your overall well-being.

Whose leadership, whose judgment, whose values do you want in the White House when that lands like a thud on the oval office desk?

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

I realized that democracy is indivisible, or rather, that freedom is indivisible. There are many clown-democracies in the Arab world, which have nothing to do with freedom.