I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.

It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” When a bit of me hurts, I always mind.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

When I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into the other’s head, like coulouring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

In a fast, the body tears down its defective parts and then builds anew when eating is resumed.

Io, Europa, Ganimedes puer, atque Calistolascivo nimium perplacuere Iovi.(Io, Europa, the boy Ganymede, and Callisto greatly pleased lustful Jupiter.)[Marius naming Jupiter's moons]

If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all.

Americans have the right to have their medical decisions made by them and their doctors, and not by those bureaucrats sitting behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away.

The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.

My cousin Francis and I are in perfect accord - he wants Milan, and so do I.

Homosexuals die decades younger than heterosexuals, from a host of maladies. They suffer mental problems ranging from depression to psychosis, and have suicide rates many times that of heterosexuals.

The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.

If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.