People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

The reason I'm being positive is to make everyone around me to get the positive energy

Every sphere of life demands enduring spirit and strength.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

You have to make your wedding day all about you.

A foreign ideology cannot be introduced into Chechnya - were it through an Arab or al-Qaeda. Our experience is rich and long enough for us to be Muslims and know what jihad is.

Buffon is a gentleman thinking only of the ball [after Gianluigi Buffon's strong tackle on Andy Carroll during a friendly with Newcastle

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

The real art of governing consists, so far as possible, in doing nothing.

Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.

If you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!