It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

By the hairy balls of Jesus

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

No, I don't miss you... Not in a way that one is missed.But I think of you. Sometimes.In the way that one might think of the summer sunshineOn a winter night...

The soul should always stand ajar ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

If you speak the truth have a foot in the stirrup.

It's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.

Oh, 'twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.

If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.

In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.

I don't want to exhibit something to someone anymore. I want to do the reverse: I want to exhibit someone to something.

It's no good to lose touch with people who mean a lot.