In each man's heart there lies a hole. A dark abyss of need, the filling of which takes precedence over all else.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

Memory is a cruel mistress with whom we all must learn to dance.

It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

Reluctance to begin is quick to befriend procrastination. . . .

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free.

I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.

Jihadis have a better bureaucracy than India.

Demonstrate to your customer the difference between price and cost. The price is what it takes to purchase the item. The cost is the amount the customer eventually pays. They are not the same.

Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.

Writing with other people is the only way I ever really work. In some ways it's great because it's helpful to someone pull you out of the loop.

With that locker room I could sleep there after games.

The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.

I didn't write songs for a very long time.

Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.