Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.

In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly.

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

An Irish queer: a fellow who prefers women to drink.

Successful business people became successful because they took risks. The biggest risk is that once successful, they stop taking risks.

The more you engage and connect, the more engagements and connections you will have.

We make stupid mistakes when we're young; we do our best to make amends for them as we get older. We survive by learning; by learning we survive. Such is life. So be it.

Life is too short to blame other people.

Glory to the heroic soldiers of the Korean People's Army!

Tourism is the biggest industry in the world.

Nothing is more beautiful than a line that brings out a form.

I don't want to be a rock star all my life. I couldn't bear to end up like Elvis Presley in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.

I suppose you could sum up the religious aspects of my boyhood by saying it was a time of life when I was taught the difference between right and wrong as it specifically applied to Catholicism.

Every single person in the world could be a genius at something, if they practiced it daily for at least ten years (as confirmed by the research of Anders Ericsson and others).