It seems wisest to assume the worst from the beginning...and let anything better come as a surprise.
However, everything has an end, everything passes away, even the hunger of people who have not eaten
I have noticed that many who do not believe in God believe in everything else, even in the evil eye.
Somewhat sadly, the survival of many bookstores now depends on selling merchandise other than books.
The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.
It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.
What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more.
I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.
...and that's when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
Though there were moments of beauty, Mariam knew for the most part that life had been unkind to her.
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.
I've seen so many screw-ups of representations of South Africa, and it makes me so angry every time.
It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.
…Jo loved a few persons very dearly and dreaded to have their affection lost or lessened in any way.
Suffering itself is beloved: love and suffering are far closer to each other than love and pleasure.
Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.
Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
One must desire something to be alive; perhaps absolute satisfaction is only another name for Death.
I've always thought the law ought to put on spectacles, it has mighty poor eyesight once in a while.
It is useless to deny that, unless one has a genius for imparting knowledge, teaching is a drudgery.
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
Those who are formed to win general admiration are seldom calculated to bestow individual happiness.
But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Even when I was writing 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette,' I started to appreciate Seattle's many charms.
A captain always knows where his ship is. It's like a psychic bond." "If only we had a captain here.
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
In the end, in England, when you want to find out how people are feeling, you always go to the pubs.
If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.
Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.
The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.
My feeling toward the animal is that he is our younger brother, and that we are our brothers keeper.
They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.
All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.
Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.