Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.

I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.

You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.

Before taking her into the library, my wife told me she was an old friend in a marriage crisis. A fatuous lie; at her age there are no crises left in marriage, only acceptance and extraction. (General Villiers)

The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks ― or something tells it ― that the remembering can be handled.

And then the earth, the world, the planet, the galaxy, and the entire solar system went crazy.

Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth.

She's an old soldier's woman, and she has antennae for things that often escape the officer in the field.

There is nothing in a crowded street more noticeable than a man running ― unless it is a woman.

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

Strangers should meet in unfamiliar areas. It's comforting.

A corruption of intentions.

there was no television in the Netherlands during the afternoons!

Indiscriminate use among unintelligent leads to chaos.

I fought...I fought and I fought...until I...couldn't remember any more.

Men and women walked casually about as they did on the main floor, every now and then stopping one another, exchanging pleasantries or scraps of relevantly irrelevant information. Gossip.