"[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept."

"You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?"

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him."

"Man is made by the places in which he lives..."

"A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious."

"Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline."

"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

"Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition."

"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered."

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer."

"[About Pinkie's character] The word murder conveyed no more to him than the word 'box', 'collar', 'giraffe'."

"It is the story-teller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval."

"No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life."

"Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?...Like a marriage from which love has gone...And patience, patience everywhere like a fog."

"The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved."

"So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o’er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore."

"It would be difficult to determine whether the age is growing better or worse; for I think our plays are growing like sermons, and our sermons like plays."

"Life! we've been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,;br>Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good morning."

"The cheerful light, the vital air, Are blessings widely given; Let nature's commoners enjoy The common gifts of heaven.The well-taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame, Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother's soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind."

"So when destruction lurks unseen, Which men like mice may share, May some kind angel clear thy path, And break the hidden snare."

"If an author would have us feel a strong degree of compassion, his characters must not be too perfect."

"This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars."

"Oh! hear a pensive captive's prayer, For liberty that sighs; And never let thine heart be shut Against the prisoner's cries."

"With Thee in shady solitudes I walk, With Thee in busy, crowded cities talk, In every creature own Thy forming power, In each event Thy providence adore."

"We may think all religions beneficial, and believe of one alone that it is true."

"I read his awful name, emblazon'd high With golden letters on th' illumin'd sky."

"If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd, And spurn'd a tyrant's chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain."

"Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripen'd in our northern sky."

"O gently guide my pilgrim feet To find thy hermit cell; Where in some pure and equal sky Beneath thy soft indulgent eye The modest virtues dwell."

"Child of mortality, whence comest thou? Why is thy countenance sad, and why are thine eyes red with weeping?"

"It is to hope, tho' hope were lost."

"Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew, In Eden's pure and guiltless garden grew.[…] Gay without toil, and lovely without art, They spring to cheer the sense, and glad the heart."

"It is, in truth, the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him."

"Let us confess a truth, humiliating perhaps to human pride;—a very small part only of the opinions of the coolest philosopher are the result of fair reasoning; the rest are formed by his education, his temperament, by the age in which he lives, by trains of thought directed to a particular track through some accidental association—in short, by prejudice."

"Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness."

"Startups don't win by attacking. They win by transcending. There are exceptions of course, but usually the way to win is to race ahead, not to stop and fight."

"If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments."

"The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. ... But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work."

"Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

"Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems."

"Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)"

"I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you."

"If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real."