I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.

How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!

All is pattern, all life, but we can't always see the pattern when we're part of it.

... wore sorrow and anger like a worn-out coat and would not throw it away.

Oh, lovely Europe, your flowers and your wine, your bread, your music.

Danger hides in beauty and beauty in danger.

It was unwise to plan too carefully. It took only one great failure to learn that lesson.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means.

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

I get terrible reviews everywhere I go.

Innovation has never come through bureaucracy and hierarchy. It's always come from individuals.

You can pay people to perform, but you can't pay people to excel.

No one is so good that he has no bad in him, & no one is so bad that he has no good in him

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon on all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment.