Success is little more than a chemical compound of man with moment.

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender

Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success.

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

People who jump to conclusions rarely alight on them.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.

The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

Its the actions one produces that will lead them toward the unknown.

When the mouse laughs at the cat, there's a hole nearby.

You play on the ice... you get what you should get.

I'm encouraging kids to use computers at their own pace to build aspirations.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

As a writer, if you have something on a page, you can start moving it around and get something you like. But if you have a blank page, it's just gonna be a blank page.

The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is measured. It's uncontroversial. It's going up. We know that has a tendency to warm the atmosphere and we should be worried about that.

The whole point of all these conversations is to leave your mind empty, not full. If you go away with learning, you have missed the opportunity

It is not the magnitude of our actions, but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.

There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.