Histories are instruments of oppression.

You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.

You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.

And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

Men die. It's practically what they're for.

First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.

I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.

Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.

...morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

Every person that you meet knows something you don't

We have a presidential election coming up. And I think the big problem, of course, is that someone will win.

I think people say women come into their prime in their 40s. And then for some reason our society just wants to go... it's like a dead flower.

My lifestyle determines my deathstyle.

It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

Sometimes we can't help the way we feel, but we can mostly choose how we respond to it.

I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.