Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot. 2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

Never pass by a chance to shut up.

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

Ignorance can't be pardoned. Only cured.

Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.

This, she thought, was what love and desperation made you do: say things that were better left unsaid, give yourself away in a million little gestures, a thousand little changes of expression.

To lose time is to lose life

It's a very old idea that patience leads to skills, of course - but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned.

That gap between half sleep and half awakening has always been occupied by nostalgia.

The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.

Don't be afraid to fail big, to dream big.

Clearly, I am not an anarchist. Philosophically, I might be, but I think in practical terms.

I think the whole tension about romanticism is the way it builds and builds, and the moment it's consummated, the tension's over.

Guns don’t kill people. The aliens behind the triggers do.

Song is the heroics of speech.