Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

...because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.

Peace broke out.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

All names mean something.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.

The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.