“You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.”

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.

You have to learn to do everything, even to die.

Art isn’t everything. It’s just about everything.

Art is the pulse of a nation.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

I wish that I was where I am.

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant.

Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant, count as nothing.

All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance, emerging from God like the rays of the sun.

Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.

I’ve still got a brilliant head of hair, which refuses to lay down.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

For the demise of the Latin monarch, he who will reign with help and support will burn a brilliant fire. The Republic’s booty divided and its bold dream disappeared.