Though men pride themselves on their great actions often they are not the result of any great design but of chance.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

Those who are great know a secret that the remaining lot do not know.

In the Seventies, my children played in the street, read politically incorrect stories, ate home-cooked food and occasional junk and, yes, were sometimes smacked.

The truth is that climate change is presenting the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

Some people get tired of continual perception of the finite universe. They feel the perception of the universe over and over in variant forms is kind of an unhappy condition, because it doesn't last.

I don't pretend for a second that I'm that great of a person on a day-to-day basis. I'm a deeply flawed human.

Ethical and responsible behavior needs to become the cornerstone of corporate behavior

Mussolini once said that saints are insane people. What about those who believe in saints? Are they sane?

I guess I usually write when I'm in a really intense headspace, because it's my form of self-therapy.

Fear not to be nothing that thou mayst be all.