What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?

There are persons who cannot make friends. Who are they? Those who cannot be friends. It is not the want of understanding or good nature, of entertaining or useful qualities, that you complain of: on the contrary, they have probably many points of attraction; but they have one that neutralizes all these --they care nothing about you, and are neither the better nor worse for what you think of them. They manifest no joy at your approach; and when you leave them, it is with a feeling that they can do just as well without you. This is not sullenness, nor indifference, nor absence of mind; but they are intent solely on their own thoughts, and you are merely one of the subjects they exercise them upon. They live in society as in a solitude.

William Hazlitt

Science fiction is also a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present.

Ray Bradbury

Blessed be the inventor of photography! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable of their absent dear ones.

Jane Welsh Carlyle, in The Colle

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

The unworthy successor of Peter who desires to benefit from the immeasurable wealth of Christ feels the great need of your assistance, your prayers, your sacrifice, and he most humbly asks this of you.

Pope John Paul II

A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world -- intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man..

Aldous Huxley

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

Napoleon Hill

Poverty must have many satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people.

Don Herold

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens -- and then everybody disagrees.

Boris Marshalov

One of the hardest things for me, now that I'm famous, is finding people who can read my stuff and give me an honest critique.

Ken Follet

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.

Lillian Hellman, The Watch on th

The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.

George Orwell