The beginning sets the rules.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.

There is a coarse and ugly temperament and tenor observable in the common unconscious person.

If I can do one hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

One of the advantages of being a 'reasonable creature' is that one can find a reason for whatever one wants to do.

Those questions - when you think about a thought, when you're believing a thought or concept and you question it - you realize that it changes things. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry.

Leisure is pain; take off our chariot wheels; how heavily we drag the load of life!

Pride indemnifies itself and loses nothing even when it casts away vanity.

Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it's helpful. So the fact that there won't be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that'd be helpful.

I'm probably better known in the US as a YA writer, I have a huge body of adult horror and fantasy behind me.