The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral port

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen

To keep a warm heart in a cold world is the real victory.

Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it--love yourself

You would think those who have endured unkindness would be kinder as a result, intent on sparing others the awful suffering they abhorred firsthand.

The women working at abortion clinics are really on the front lines and the true heroes of feminism.

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze. It maketh me to wake in green pastures: It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses. It restoreth my buzz.

I like reading, I like boring things, and yet I think people for ages had this image of me that I was on the tube with a chainsaw looking for any likely candidate.

I could stop and live carefully but that's ridiculous. I don't want to live carefully.

You grow up Latin in this country and you're a third class citizen from the word go, and so you have to deal with everything around you from that point of view and trying to feel entitled.

Peace needs and takes time, it needs and takes caution, it needs and takes patience after 30 years of terrorism and violence.