Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?

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.

People living without God dies first spiritually and then physically

Giving without expectation leads to receiving without limitation.

The stronger you become, the lower your voice become.

The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.

The bold are helpless without cleverness.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

I think, once recipes become digital, pirating a digital recipe and all the questions that you have with music and so forth will become pertinent to food as well.

I spent so much of my younger life drinking, and being drunk makes learning to be a grown-up kind of hard.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.