The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

One day it will be over, and I don’t care.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

A lot of times, people have something that they’re afraid of. They’ve got a client that’s mad at them. They’ve got a project that’s due. And they let that stress hang over their head. I don’t let that happen.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

In one way, I suppose, I have been ‚in denial‘ for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

In married life three is company and two none.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

I’ve always put everybody else’s child first before my own health, before my own outfit, before my own time frame.

Sin is geographical.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

I hope to stand firm enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I’m going to be alive, I want to be challenged – to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn’t an easy way, but it’s a rewarding way.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Make measurable progress in reasonable time.

Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.