Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

A tree is an incomprehensible mystery.

If the patient has been to more than four physicians, nutrition is probably the medical answer.

I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it.

At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.

It is not a move, even the best move that you must seek, but a realizable plan

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

One path alone leads to a life of peace. The path of virtue.

I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

I don't know why I have these dreams. I've never wanted to be Pope. In fact, I have a greater affinity to Martin Luther.

Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels.