I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.

Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.

Meditation is spending time with the self. It is the time to be intimated with the soul.

And he was. Suddenly. From not being to being conscious that he was.

I tried Botox once. Never again. It made my forehead freeze.

It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides.

Without the a test you don't have a testimony.

I tend not to work with a specific person in mind. Art is a matter of statistics. It's not about individuals. It's about people.

Natural erosion had reduced the critical barrier islands in the Gulf, the result of the destruction of some 300,000 acres of wetlands. This amounted to 30 miles of marshlands.

You can't take no Chinese man and give him no Puerto Rican woman and talking like they're in love and emotionally in love and physically.

The claim that American women are downtrodden and unfairly treated is the fraud of the century.

The tsar [Nicholas II] is not treacherous but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfils all its functions.