Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.

I wondered what it would be like to be just myself all the time, but my self seemed to be far away, and made up of all sorts of things that didn't really exist.

The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.

Religion is the worst enemy of mankind. No single war in the history of humanity has killed as many people as religion has.

When I think about my children and how different their futures might be as a result of climate change, it makes me determined to do something about it.

It will never be a perfect time, you can only make time perfect.

True elegance is for me the manifestation of an independent mind.

The Christian life becomes impossible. That is, it becomes supernatural.

As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

Anything that's expanding the mind and heart is happiness. But it's not a goal.

I usually say I did the best I could with what I had. I have no major regrets.