The best would be to have friends who came and went away; but if I had to choose between their never coming or never going away, I think I would choose that they do not come.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

Drink very good tea out of a thin Wocester cup of colour between apricot and pink.

Wanting is the beginning of getting.

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.

I don't know if I believe in God, but I know I believe in the devil. I have met him.

You can be a nuisance to your family. You mustn't be a nuisance to your friends.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

The thing I am most afraid of is love. When you say you love someone you are giving them license to hurt you.

I would never understand how hurt and confused and hopeless he must have felt, to decide it wasn't worth trying, and I wasn't mad at him anymore for doing it...

If it can bleed, we can kill it.

The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as he [Saddam Hussein] is in power.

Of all the rooms in the house your bedroom is yours

I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.

A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.

If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society.

That they dared make a town of this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step bespoke the glorious and yearning bullshit of men's souls.

Your soul either feels lifted by something that you read, or it feels squashed by it.