When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

More and more I am learning to let go of urgency and to let my soul sink deeply and refreshingly into contemplation of the joy of the Spirit.

Though the cross repels, it also attracts. It possesses a magnetic quality.

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Be careful. Everything you say, every single day, may be recorded in your students’ hearts forever.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

We can bolster human spirits, clothe cold bodies, feed hungry people, comfort grieving hearts, and lift to new heights precious souls.

I don't see myself as a stand-up comic doing cynical, mean-spirited or disrespectful stuff. I'm very aware that I don't like to disrespect people too much.