You never so much want to be happy with a woman as when you know that you're ceasing to care for her.

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything.

No specter assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.

It is better to put on the brakes sooner, for some fine day you begin to understand — to pardon everything — and then where is the charm of life, if you cannot love or hate any more?

I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?

To be practical in life means to take everything seriously and nothing tragically.

It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

The principal task of friendship is to foster one's friends' illusions.

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death.

Oh, we do not understand death, we never understand it; creatures are only truly dead when everyone else has died who knew them.

When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.

Be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.

That's what happens when people reach old age; nobody remembers they've been bastards too.

Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.

...his hoofbeats fall like rain, over and over again.

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

You know how many seeds are in an apple. But you don't know how many apples are in a seed.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.