Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself.
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.
The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.
We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.
The profoundest distances are never geographical.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.
One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love. " They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
I'm a bit of a political geek anyway, so you tend to write how you think the rhythms of an administration will go.
When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.
Pushing the envelope' sort of implies that you're inside the envelope with everyone else, and you're trying to find the edges on the outsides.
About cars: They can list with faithful accuracy each model they acquired through the years, how much they paid for each one, its main faults, and why they traded it in - but they couldn't list as many close friends.