A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. “I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?

Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they...

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws?

Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.

Teachers’re always using that “in your own words.” I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It’s their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How’re you s’posed...

One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards will be at one’s throat all the sooner.

… in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights”, the only law, are whatever is willed...

The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That’s it.

Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.

Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn’t sound like very powerful magic to me.

Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it’s a scientific fact that virgins can’t get pregnant. Stella told me.

If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

La paz es como el cristal: si se golpea repetidamente, termina mostrando su fragilidad.

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.

Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up...

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

As if Art is the What, not the How!

A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat

there’re times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has...

I added ‘writers’ to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

Disco’s are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don’t.

The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun.

The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?” I...

(…)entre todas las razas del mundo, nuestra sed, o mejor dicho, nuestra avidez, de tesoros, de oro, de especias y de dominio, ¡oh, si!, sobre todo del dulce dominio, ¡es la más aguda, la más...

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block…

are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.

…It’s as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn’t matter. I mean, I know we’re all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor...

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

The learnin’ mind is the livin’ mind… an’ any sort o’ smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn’t want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can...

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small,...