“She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

In your hands winter is a book with cloud pages that snow pearls of love.

On the other hand, a central bank can overregulate and choke the economy, and then we will have a dead banking industry.

You just came wild and sexy all over my hand and even left some claw marks on my back to prove it. Don’t go getting shy on me now. ‘Cause baby, before the night is over you will be naked in my bed.

The security and the future of Jordan is hand-in-hand with the future of the Palestinians and the Israelis.

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

I smiled and ran my hand through his dark curls. “So, Death, what do we do now?

My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.