As happens with people who love a thing too much, it destroys them. Oscar Wilde said, 'You destroy the thing that you love.' It's the other way around. What you love destroys you.

I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.

I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.

The New York Times published the guest list on the front page. The masks were a brilliant concept.

The smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book.

Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else.

At the base of it was the urge, if you wanted to play football, to knock someone down, that was what the sport was all about, the will to win closely linked with contact.

Art has something to do with the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

He still has the same way of calling to me, as if I'm still new to him, as if he has yet to get over me.

I am obviously not a patient person.

Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.

No shade no shine no butterflies no bees No fruits no flowers no leaves no birds November!

One thing about failing repeatedly: If you're still doing it after you've failed that much, you really mean it.

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

As a true translator you will take care not to translate word for word.

Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but a cry from suffering organs.

The most successful exploiter is the one who makes others feel that he or she has their best interests at heart.

The pressures, I don't really like to think about the pressures, I like to solve them, you know what I mean. I could sit here and complain about pressures but nobody wants to hear about pressures.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.