English culture is basically homosexual in the sense that the men only really care about other men.

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.

Man is jealous because of his amour propre; woman is jealous because of her lack of it.

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.

to be right in the wrong direction may be wrong

By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president . . . except me.

In the '60s and '70s people were a little bit more naive and trusting and got in people's cars without thinking about it.

All one's personality is embedded in gloves and hats after they've been good and used. Show me a glove and I'll tell you the character of its owner.

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

When something I can't control happens, I ask myself : where is the hidden gift, where is the positive in this?

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

Be careful how you live; you will be the only Bible some people ever read.