If you choose the sort of life which has no conventional pattern you have to try to make an art of it, or it is a mess.

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.

Patriotism is nationalism, and always leads to war.

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

The clamours of spring are the same old delicate noises, The earth renews its magical youth at a breath.

The past is just data. I only see the future.

I think when it comes to Botox and surgery, actresses should do it or not do it, but be honest about their choices.

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.

The environment does not determine man's culture; it merely sets the outer limits and at the same time offers opportunities.

With all her masculine vigour and glory, Greece fell, gradually atrophied, because one half of her had been, of set purpose, intellectually and politically paralyzed.

Fiction is about feeling, which is to say that short stories are about all of us.