When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Nobody is better than me.

[T]hat mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

A painting which does not take its inspiration from the heart is nothing more than futile juggling.

The strongest have their moments of fatigue.

But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.

I am not well educated or bright enough to be politically clued in, but I hope in the film that I'm going to shock a few people, win a lot of people over.

My compulsion is to create things.

The cold, the changed, perchance the dead, anew, The mourn'd, the loved, the lost,-too many, yet how few!

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures.