Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

C.S. Lewis

Winning a competition in architecture is a ticket to oblivion. It's just an idea. Ninety-nine per cent never get built.

Daniel Libeskind

There's this thing of you can live in a city and be completely alone, not notice anything going on around you.

Simon Pegg

My pipe is out, my glass is dry;My fire is almost ashes too;But once again, before you go,And I prepare to meet the New;Old Year! a parting word that's true,For we've been comrades, you and I--I thank God for each day of you;There! bless you now! Old Year, good-bye!

Robert William Service, The Pass

Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.

Jodi Picoult

I've never had WiFi at home. I'm too easily distracted, and YouTube is too tempting.

Dave Eggers

I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.

Edward Weston

You know, we - we start with a mentality that we'll take a sports project if its good. And we're certainly not on the lookout for them, because to be honest we don't have to. They walk in the door.

Jim Lampley

Bringing an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may help the young Arab generation to realise their aspirations. Israel is more than willing to offer our experience in building a modern economy in spite of limited resources to the whole region.

Shimon Peres

As a private lawyer, I could bill $750 an hour, but I don't.

Jay Alan Sekulow

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

Wendell Phillips

There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, Did you get an erection? If the answer is Yes from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.

W. H. Auden