Virtue is increased by the smile of approval; and the love of renown is the greatest incentive to honourable acts.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Stories come to me in mysterious ways, more like dreams than reasoned creations.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.

One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

You want proof there's a God? Look outside, watch a sunset.

The most critical thing in a negotiation is to get inside your opponent's head and figure out what he really wants.

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

Two sittings a day of my models and I'm totally exhausted.

My plan after office is to get up and spend that entire first day helping my wife move into her new senatorial office.