“It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.”

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.

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.

There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

It is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so.

I like the discipline of well-cut, impeccable clothes. I think it’s a very healthy discipline.

Bargain… anything a customer thinks a store is losing money on.

That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.

One of the commonest mistakes is thinking your worries are over when your children get married.

Why did everyone think i needed a new boyfriend? I didn’t need a new boyfriend. I’d had enough of boyfriends to last a lifetime. The only thing a boyfriend was good for was a shattered heart.