“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

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

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

God save us always,’ I said ‘from the innocent and the good.

The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other.

It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

All good novelists have bad memories.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

I don’t think I’m inherently feminist. I think the universe wants me to be a feminist, and I think I resonate with that. I think it just chose me to be this female energy, thing. And I’m very drawn to female energy, but I don’t really have any prerequisites in feminism. I just roll with it.

There are a lot of similar aspects in all the religions. The question is which side of it you hold up.

Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.

Never send a battalion to take a hill if a regiment is available.

Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities (the Burkean view)?

in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.