Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Don’t let your day dreams become your personally living nightmare.

With an old head and a young heart, you can be a source of real strength [to others] who need your cheer and encouragement.

If philosophy has to serve some really noble purpose, it must be more observant than critical towards life.

What was civilization ever, really, but the attempt by man to talk himself into being good?

It began as a mistake.

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

I'll put it frankly - Britain has more influence in China than Norway or Switzerland, with all respect for the other countries.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

In certain places, not always, there are moments where I tried to convey in English a sense of foreignness. I wanted the reader to get the sense that another language is being spoken.

Ballet is like any other art form in that we all start out knowing nothing about it.