Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

I think any man who lets a woman pick what he should wear… I mean, you gotta draw the line somewhere as a man. I see these guys, ‚My wife told me to wear this!‘ And I just shake my head.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

Relationships are like traffic lights. And I just have this theory that I can only exist in a relationship if it’s a green light.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.

My friends, there are no friends.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

Marriage is this grand madness, and I think if people knew that, they would perhaps take it more seriously.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

When people need love and understanding and support the most is when they deserve it the least.

I think the perfection of love is that it’s not perfect.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Sure, I can get a little bit jealous. The good part about jealousy is that it comes from passion. It’s also the dangerous part and it’s an ugly emotion that hurts.

The United States and our allies are determined: we refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

In football, I don’t have a lot of friends. The people who I really trust, there are not many… Most of the time, I’m alone.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

There are two kinds of people in this world. ‚I‘ people and ‚we‘ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‚we‘ person.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

It is the failing of youth not to be able to restrain its own violence.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

I’m working at trying to be a Christian, and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy – it’s serious business.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

I don’t eat with beautiful women alone.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.

I’m just a friendly person; that runs in my family.

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Genius, when young, is divine.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.