Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

It hadn't been so long ago, yet sometimes she felt that she'd been an altogether different person back then.

I remain someone of little consequence, as if nothing more than dandelion fluff caught on a breeze.

You have to bind the devil and command him to set these people free.

The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.

If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.

If you would be good, first believe that you are bad.

"Statesman" presumes I'm out there giving opinions all the time about things, and no, I'm not interested in opining on a lot of subjects.

I want to stay in the moment and enjoy the great things that are happening.

If you know it, but you're not living it, you don't own it.