My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

If you're lucky as you get older, you respect the craft and it becomes a skill.

Frank Langella

Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the sould of the universe. It's your mission on earth.

Paulo Coelho

I am already kindly disposed towards you. My friendship it is not in my power to give: this is a gift which no man can make, it is not in our own power: a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it.

William Wordsworth

I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark.

John Green

We found out tonight how important and how crucial momentum swings can be. I thought we were playing very well. We were doing a lot of positive things but then we lost the puck two times in our zone and things swung their way. You can't afford to give teams momentum.

Saku Koivu

Speaking of Twitter, I don't even know if I composed a blog entry in 2009, as I was too busy parceling my every thought into cute 140-character sound bites. I used to only worry about being pithy for a living now some of my best lines are wasted on a free app!

Diablo Cody

Pizza certainly has its place in school meals, but equating it with broccoli, carrots and celery seriously undermines this nation's efforts to support children's health and their ability to learn because of better school nutrition.

Jared Polis

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.

Henry David Thoreau

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Manuel Puig

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation that is governed by shopkeepers.

Adam Smith

Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.

William Goldman

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.

Friedrich Durrenmatt