If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

It takes two to make a love affair and a mans meat is too often a woman's poison.

The good traveler has the gift of surprise.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.