So many stories are determined before they start.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

It is most unlikely. But--here comes the big "but"--not impossible.

But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

All animals are born with innocence, curiosity and love.

And once you're unafraid with death, I think your capacity for violence is immediately increased. Once you're unafraid of death, you are a very, very dangerous adversary

When you think of the sort of things that happen when a genocide happens, it's again not people who are intrinsically evil.

Paradoxes are the only truths.

We emphasized the creativeness that happens at the moment of seeing over the kind that takes place in the dark room.

I've called David Cameron worse things than joker....and a former Prime Minister Tony Blair is widely referred to as a war criminal.