Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

Most of my friends' fathers had been in the war - either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort - the wire business - and, of course, I was so young I didn't understand any of this.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.