I left a pause. ‘You sound like a certain kind of surgeon. A lot more interested in the operation than the patient.’ ‘I should not like to be in the hands of a surgeon who did not take that view.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.

There are only two races on this planet - the intelligent and the stupid.

There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

An answer is always a form of death.

To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

You can't answer violence with counter violence ... The answer is love. The best sabotage is love.

The more you kick something that's dead, the worse it smells.

Be completely true to yourself and you'll be happy.

Do we want to emulate China in the way that China emulates the West? I think, for most Americans, the answer to that question would be no.

Science is a collection of stories, linking characters worthy of notice.

By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness.

I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.

I think love and friends are two things that you don't chase. True love and true friends come.