Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.

You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.

If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.

I'm not interested in making a $60-million studio film with a bunch of 24-year-olds telling me what to do.

Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catherine! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing on my lips.

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

Market growth alone doesn't give you enough tailwind. You have to create your own. The way to do that is by designing products for consumers that wow them.

What I need to do to heal myself and to be assuring and allay the fears of others and to heal them, if they had any heart wounds from something I may have said.

For me, being in prison writing in an African language was a way of saying: "Even if you put me in prison, I will keep on writing in the language which made you put me in prison."

I was given a talent to play cricket. I don't know why I was given it. But I was. I owe it to all those who wish it had been them to give of my best, every day.

Punk rock has become another viable art form. It always was. But now it's like everyone's doing it.

BEFORE I DISCOVERED THE miracles of science, magic ruled the world.