Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.The teevee debilitates our culture.

Hate is infectious, but so is love, the difference between the two is one takes effort and the other one doesn’t.

Somewhere along the line we stopped trying to fix the child that we had expected and started to enjoy the child that was.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

True initiation is a response to an inner calling; it requires that you face personal challenges heroically and experience a genuine rebirth into a new way of being.

Nelson Mandela was a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death - a true global hero.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

I used to worry about what life was for - now being alive seems sufficient reason.

It was not possible to broadcast any of that because of an agreement between Jackson and the family [of the child]. Our legal advice was that we could not broadcast it.

All inconsiderate enterprises are impetuous at first, but soon lanquish. [Lat., Omnia inconsulti impetus coepta, initiis valida, spatio languescunt.]