Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.

Cell phones, alas, have pretty much ruined train travel, which I used to love. I could read or even sketch notes for what I was working on.

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.

Ive always got a novel under way, but if I try to work on it every day, exclusively, I falter. So I always keep more than one thing going.

I actually think that Bandbox, by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.

To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.

The late Tom Wicker's biography of Nixon, called 'One of Us, ' is really quite good: you see the biographer discovering dimensions of sympathy for his subject that he hadn't expected to feel.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all.

You can't be without passion. Passion means the possessiveness to be the best.

I played basketball and soccer but they are very different games, obviously. However, playing any kind of sport always helps you develop physically.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities.

I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.

I think one of the problems the Democrats have today is that they are an elitist party.

I am neither frustrated nor planning anything other than being the best Secretary of State I could be.

Here, far from our homes, we will be forgotten by our gods.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.