There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: 'You see,' he says, 'now that’s formalism.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.

What do young girls dream of? Of the knife and of blood.

Memory belongs to the imagination.

Deux me' tresou un peu plusse parent donc l'homme de la femme. Two metres, or a little more, separates a man from a woman.

On n'e chappe pas a' son sort. One cannot escape destiny.

With the world in a chaos of questions, family should be the answer.

Art might be beautiful even though the artist is not.

Whenever someone has the ability to impact people's lives, I think that's one of the greatest things that God gives us as individuals.

Nothing under heaven so strongly doth allure the sense of man, and all his mind possess, as beauty's love.

If you make a film about a pig farmer in Wales and you are a huge hit as the pig farmer's wife, the next thing is you'll be asked to do a film about a sheep farmer in Scotland.

Hope is like a path in the countryside.

Chess will always be in the doldrums as a spectator sport while a draw is given equal mathematical value as a decisive result.

I need my trusty Mac laptop to write. I can't work with anything else. I'm used to the feel of the keys. I also like, more than anything else, Apple's Pages.

We found if you took the dog out for 45 minutes a day and worked with it that the solitary stress hormone, cortisol, went down. But then it went right back up again because they didn't keep doing it.

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.