A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

gossip ... was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.