So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

Love is a diseases which makes the mind stop functioning and the heart beating faster.

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise.

There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.

The will was of Zeus, the hand of Hephaestus.

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

I don't expect to be thin, but I'd like to feel a bit healthier.

Often the best way to relax is just to go back to work.