The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

My love translated sounds like a dead language.

It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.

Our language one of our most precious natural resources deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands streams and whooping cranes.

So, it's good to be here, wherever I am.

It's kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.

I've been writing forever, 20 years.

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.

It is the nature of love to love as much as we feel we are loved and to love whatever the one we love loves.