After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Anecdotes came with his DNA.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that college is for smart people. College eats smart people alive.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

I grew up doing theater when I was very young - always enjoyed it.

You must never lose the awareness that in yourself you are nothing, you are only an instrument. An instrument is nothing until it is lifted.

O! Lover, Enjoyment on the soft body of a lotus is always risky and inconsistent because its route is always surrounded by thorns.

Much is due to those who first broke the way to knowledge, and left only to their successors the task of smoothing it.

You better not brag, you're a hunky old hag, and that goes for your mother, too.

It is certain because it is possible.

Solace? That's why God made fermented beverages and the blues.