Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Leaning his forehead against Michael's, Dominic admitted, "I didn't dance then. I think I was waiting for you.

The family is one of the greatest traps that society has used for millennia to keep man a slave

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.

Peace does not fare well where poverty and deprivation reign

Few politicians are good at taking the high ground and throwing themselves off it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

There's no point stepping up to the golden platform if you're going to repeat yourself.

I'm perfectly happy to color within the network lines when I have to.

Elitism is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.