The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

People on corporate conveyor belts, like animals in slaughter-chutes are all part of the same big massacre of joy.

I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.

Waihi Beach. It's a lovely beach, and we're right on the shore and I get a lot of pleasure out of waking up in the morning and hearing the waves roll in.

The council in Blackpool have given the homeless bus passes, but how would they know where to get off?

There's no rule that everyone has to change.

What we do with little kids today will matter in 20 years. If you don't get it right, you will have an unlivable environment. That's the crisis I see.

I was always small. I was a leadoff hitter growing up, until I was 13 or 14 years old and had a little growth spurt and started hitting home runs.

Truth is not private property.

The powerful hold in deep remembrance an ill-timed pleasantry. [Lat., Facetiarum apud praepotentes in longum memoria est.]

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.