But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.

Your work is a separate thing from you. You are this person who has your friends and your life, and you have to see the separation. If you see the separation between your work and yourself it's so much easier.

Julie Brown

I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.

Samuel Johnson

My soul is in the sky.

William Shakespeare

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

Annie Lennox

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Steps are what you take when you think you have forever.

Nicholas Lore, The Pathfinder

A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.

John F. Kennedy

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

William Styron

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

Charles Caleb Colton

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Albert Camus

It is sheer madness to live in want in order to be wealthy when you die.

Juvenal

Life... It tends to respond to our outlook, to shape itself to meet our expectations.

Richard M. DeVos