too much safety is abhorrent to the nature of a human being.

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.

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver, " she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.

A star never loses its shine, not even in the dark.

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

I'm a lifetime St. Louis Cardinals fan.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

Women are the twin halves of men.

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.

The ruling in the Paula Jones case is so silly.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.