The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

...It is a well known fact that most artists produce their best work early in their career. They may refine what they do but you usually get the measure of what they are about on their first outing.

But destiny is a very peculiar thing, with a complex timing that is impossible to comprehend.

All of us are in desperate need of the restoration of our wholeness through union with our inmost self.

The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly.

Al Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.

Had Tibet not fallen away from dharma China could not have invaded.

I have been asked to pose for Penthouse on my hundredth birthday. Everybody is going to be sorry.

It is no tragedy to do ungrateful people favors, but it is unbearable to be indebted to a scoundrel.

I wish I wasn't the war president. Who in the heck wants to be a war president? I don't.

I also want to encourage anybody who was affected by Hurricane Corina to make sure their children are in school.