In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points.

I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke a cigarette thinking. I wonder what great things have come from those hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is only proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

He best knows his own heart, and what His own ends and designs were in the wonderful works which He has wrought.

The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this; decide what you want.

I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Africa will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.

People all the time say, oh, if you only knew Hillary Clinton the way I know Hillary Clinton.