I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't.

Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat . . .

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance.

When you are not making the present moment into a means to an end, you also are not making every human being you meet - in your business and even at home, in your family - into a means to an end.

the struggle for the right to become politicians in itself made women into politicians.

A good athlete always mentally replays a competition over and over, even in victory, to see what might be done to improve the performance the next time.

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.

Pass the popcorn, please. Life is a film, theatre, a theatre of the soul. We play different roles on different stages. At death, we walk offstage. At birth, we walk onstage.

Listen carefully. The way(s) we speak about things is revealing.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.

The sight of him did something to me I've never quite been able to explain. He was more than tremendous speed and beauty of motion. He set me dreaming.