The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

As far as I’m concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I’m a fairly undisciplined writer.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican...

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Authors know that you should never really write a funny book because funny books do not get awards. Comic novels will not get awards.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the...

I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot...

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to...

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Without Hitler, the State of Israel probably would not exist today. To that extent he was probably the Jews’ greatest friend.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Is the chemical aftertaste the reason why people eat hot dogs, or is it some kind of bonus?

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it’s a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Life – and I don’t suppose I’m the first to make this comparison – is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.