No difference exists between American and European manners. A proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.

I was no pope - I could not boast infallibility.

I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life.

Withholding information that would get innocent people killed was the right thing to do, not a journalistic sin.

Certainly there is a depression I think a lot of Black folks are getting ready to have come January [2017] and that might be an interesting story to tell.

A faithless woman, if known to be such by the person concerned, is but faithless; if she is believed faithful, she is treacherous.

Surely love has nothing to do with the mind, it is not the product of the mind; love is entirely independent of calculation, of thought.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

Physic is, for the most part, only a substitute for temperance and exercise.

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.

An honest lie is better than a boring truth.