Miles exhaled carefully, faint with rage and reminded grief. He does not know, he told himself. He cannot know... "Ivan, one of these days somebody is going to pull out a weapon and plug you, and you're going to die in bewilderment, crying, "What did I say? What did I say?" "What did I say?" asked Ivan indignantly.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.

When I go down into the ground at last, as God is my judge, I pray my best-beloved may have better to say of me than, "He didn't hit me."

Escapist literature gets a bad rap. But I think escape is important for a lot of people in a lot of places.

You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.