“The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection.”

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it’s going to be told.

You can’t blame a writer for what the characters say.

Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.

The good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to get dressed up for it.

The better the actor, the more stupid he is.

They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?

Imagination, of course, can open any door – turn the key and let terror walk right in.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.

It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

I can see every monster as they come in.

Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.

Great fury, like great whisky, requires long fermentation.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

the Law has made the man and wife one person, and that one person the husband!

Laws are like spiders webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.

Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.

To make an empire durable, the magistrates must obey the laws and the people the magistrates.

The world’s history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.