"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."

"Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."

"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back."

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size."

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded."

"We have got to stop worrying about being loved and start worrying about being respected. And that's exactly how I'll lead our country."

"I'm a conservative, pro-life governor in a state where it is really tough to be both. A state like New Jersey, with lots of Democrats, but still we cut taxes, we balanced budgets. We fought the teacher's union."

"I don't disagree with ending Congress' retirement program. I'm a governor; I don't have a retirement program in my state, and I don't disagree with that."

"Social Security is meant to be - to make sure that no one who's worked hard and played by the rules and paid into the system grows old in poverty in America."

"I was appointed United States attorney on September 10, 2001. And I spent the next seven years of my career fighting terrorism and putting terrorists in jail."

"We have a lot of work to do in New Jersey, but I am darn proud we've brought our state back."

"We vetoed five income tax increases during my time as governor. We cut business taxes $2.3 billion, and we cut regulation by one-third of what my predecessor put in place."

"If anybody ran a business like that they would be out of business quickly, and Barack Obama's leadership is driving this business, the United States of America, toward a fiscal cliff."

"I don't think there's anybody in America who thinks my personality is best suited to being Number Two."

"You're "saying "'will it become politically unpopular to have the position I'm having.' If it does, so be it."

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

"Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life."

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"They can because they think they can."

"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."

"The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them."

"The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness."

"It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work."

"I don't compromise my principles for politics."

"I think Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time. Whether he'll do it again in the future, I don't know. But Gov. Romney never has."

"Sometimes, when you see the newspaper and you read something I said, you say, 'Oh, I can't believe he said that.'"

"If I missed my moment, I missed my moment. I mean, I wasn't pining to be president of the United States."

"If you're sick, take your sick day. If you don't take your sick day, know what your reward is? You weren't sick - that was the reward."

"Here's what I know about political campaigns: no matter what you map out at the beginning, it's always different at the end."

"I'm so tired of talking about Warren Buffett."

"The people of New Jersey stepped up. They shared in the sacrifice. You know what else they did? They rewarded politicians who lead instead of politicians who pandered."

"But our leaders of today have decided it's more important to be popular, to say and do what's easy, and say yes rather than to say no, when no is what is required."

"Well, let me tell you, after three years of Obama, we are hopeless and changeless, and we need Mitt Romney to bring us back, to bring America back."

"One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly."

"The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own."

"You send a boy to school in order to make friends of the right sort."

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

"A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out."

"It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer."

"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order."

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."

"I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose."