How quickly the dead faded into each other,

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you.

He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

We go on our hands and knees and crawl our way towards the truth

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

In that shrinking moment he discovered that he had never hated anyone until now. It was a feeling as pure as love, but dispassionate and icily rational.

It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.

He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

You know your Lamborghini is on fire, right?

Don't feel so small and condemn yourself. You are the universe, so love and compliment yourself.

I might be celibate, but I appreciate the wonder of the sacrament of marriage.

You know they say the most dangerous person of the world is a member of the United States Congress just home from a three-day fact-finding trip.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

There are no 'come shoot me' clothes.

There was never a person who did anything worth doing that he did not receive more than he gave.

Misfortunes, untoward events, lay open, disclose the skill of a general, while success conceals his weakness, his weak points.

So much of contemporary liberalism seems to be never having grown up.

I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation.