There are truths which can kill a nation.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

We all have special numbers in our lives, and 4 is that for me. It's the day I was born. My mother's birthday, and a lot of my friends' birthdays, are on the fourth; April 4 is my wedding date.

The biggest obstacle to people becoming better is that you have to really want to be a good person in order to be a better person, and most people would rather be other things.

Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.

Sexual fulfillment is the banana life dangles in front of us just to keep us running.

If I'd never have picked up the first person, I'd never have picked up the 42,000 in Calcutta.

Life's a song,sing it

I like to buy things I can understand. I do a lot of research on things.