...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

When we're struck with cruelty, we can either inflict the same on others like it's a rite of passage, or decide that here is where it stops.

There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it.

Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.

Men are like parking spaces: all the good ones are taken, and the available ones are handicapped.

Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume.

For things to change, you've got to change. For things to get better, you've got to get better.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

Social Security was always supposed to be basically, in theory, an insurance program where you pay in and then you get out.

I don't have a type. I don't have a specific kind of human being. It's just kind of an X-factor of sorts. Everybody I've ever dated has been a case-by-case situation.