If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.

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.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

You must never travel on the road of hopelessness because that road is deprived of any kind of light!

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.

Nobody can put a character on paper without - at any rate in part and at times - sitting as a model for it himself.

Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school.

I could have knocked him out in the 3rd round but I wanted to do it slowly, So he would remember this night for a long time.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

I'm really, really emotional.