To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

I will never ask of you the impossible, I just ask you to love me in the best way you can.

Eat your food slowly and chew each bite completely (20-30 chomps is ideal) to facilitate proper digestion.

A salary does not make a person rich, but only gives him the opportunity to take care of hisneeds. It is not a means of becoming wealthy. It is a means of fulfilling our potential.

In painting, you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no-one can deal with it.

So I need the story, Jenna. I need the truth. Right, like the two are the same thing.

All roads lead to Rome, but our antagonists think we should choose different paths.

Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.

Humility is simply believing and accepting what God says about us, and God says that we are anything but worthless.

Only saints can save the world. And only our own sins can stop us from being saints.