People are surprised at how down-to-earth I am. I like to stay home on Friday nights and listen to 'The Art of Happiness' by the Dalai Lama.

Unless followed by the world 'education', has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then a religious, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its 'selling-power', has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word would have said if it had not been 'cornered' by politicians. , , , and have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word . And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as .

C.S. Lewis

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

Orson Scott Card

Poverty is what I'm writing about.

George Orwell

Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden.My words echoThus, in your mind.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Four

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

William Faulkner

I am especially grateful that I have been able to keep my own style over the decades, in spite of the many changes that have taken place in the world of fashion and in its business.

Valentino Garavani

You know, that's the only good thing about divorce; you get to sleep with your mother.

Clare Boothe Luce

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

Marcus Aurelius

Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.

Max Muller

They lard their lean books with the fat of others work.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

What is life, when wanting love? Night without a morning love's the cloudless summer sun, nature gay adorning.

Robert Burton