“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

We must all learn a good lesson – how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world, learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is, the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.

I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.

No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree.

To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic. People and nations compete, but that is not all that they do.

To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties – of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence.