I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow!

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

The only thing I want is something I can't have; and that is to know if, 100 years from now, people will still buy my books.

What the tongue has promised, the body must submit to.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.