“They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.”

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.

It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.

If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,

The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.

You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

It depends on the journalist, it depends how much information they have about the case and which perspective they are asking you from. All of these things can play a role.

People expect a nice period piece, but that’s not always the case. There’s a deep human mystery in his work.

Be hated. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions.

It made me feel very old, really, because it wasn’t eccentric for its own sake, it was just very original.

In every treaty, insert a clause which can easily be violated, so that the entire agreement can be broken in case the interests of the State make it expedient to do so.

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.

[These books] should be written in a way that they are serious, soberly argued, well researched, and make a respectable case-agree or disagree.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.