I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.