Madame....gloatingly savored her words as earlier she had savored her pig's trotter.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

The only limitations you have are those limitations you accept.

Jade felt the cool rain on her new shapechanger skin.

I so want to believe him, but right now even his touch feels like a lie.

God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.

The economists will have to revise their theories of value.

They used to have a fish on the menu that was smoked, grilled and peppered They did everything to this fish but pistol-whip it and dress it in Bermuda shorts.

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

I just want to work on things that are really hard, and when I'm not working on things that are really hard, I want to hang out with people I like to be with, and that's it.

My countrymen should have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and minds like thunderbolt.