It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I wear a lot of pink cos' seeing pink activates endorphins and energizes my creativity. It is a colour of femininity and fierceness

Money cannot buy happiness.

I retired at age 40 because my daughters looked at me one day and said: 'Dad, being bald and wearing shorts doesn't look good together'.

The end of Religion is not to teach us how to die, but how to live.

The public doesn't care about figures.

I was born out of wedlock. Nobody brought me up.

I don't believe that life can be counted by years or days, but by experience and how you leave the world by the way you live.

A spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.

Unfortunately, my love life is nil. I'm working too much - but I would like to settle down at some point.

[Jason] faltered when he looked at Leo, who was mimicking taking notes with an air pencil. “Go on, Professor Grace!” he said, wide-eyed. “I wanna get an A on the test.