We are the same people as we were at three six ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so perhaps at six or seven because we were not pretending so much then.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

What was the point of being holed up with someone who didn't believe in me when I had people out there who did?

Is it not enough to shine, To know that friends are true?That love is born of friendship, And who you are is you?

You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can't.

US President Gerald Ford's golf was so bad we thought he was a 'Hitman for the PGA!

There's nothing quite so irritating to an author as a family member's easy confidence that, of course, the book will come.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

No one so poignantly realizes the failures in the social structure as the man at the bottom, who has been most directly in contact with those failures and has suffered most.

Well all tai chi has the martial aspect to it, a lot of people don't know, a lot of the teachers won't show it, or they do show it but you don't really learn it, what the application is.

I was born the son of a humble mechanic. A quantum mechanic.