“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”

“You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.”

“If the end does not justify the means - what can?”

“Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.”

“Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most hone...”

“Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do...”

“Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.”

“[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.”

“Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the pa...”