I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The quality of the relationships that students have in class with their peers and teachers is important to their success in school.

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he's not the man she married?

The nature of life is mess, chaotic, exquisitely beautiful, excruciatingly painful, immensely joy-filled, and unpredictable.

But it is easy to call a man in love a mad man.

When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.

In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.

I don't believe in simply accumulating money, but I have the luxury to say that, because I have enough for all my needs

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist.

Discrimination in public benefits is also perfectly legal. Under federal law, people convicted of drug felonies are deemed ineligible even for food stamps.

No government can be trusted, that does not trust its own people with military-style arms of greater weight and power than those possessed by the central government itself.