"There are more Baptist preachers in Texas than Baptist missionaries in all the world."

“It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)”

“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.”

“If you get trapped in your head and out of your body during the writing process, it's very easy to make wrong turns. You have to really be in touch with your heart rather than your head to write the novel you want.”

“What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary”

“I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.”

“Etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux. To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.”

“Traveling around, it can get very stressful sometimes, and I found yoga, thank God, like a couple of years ago. I went to my first yoga class, and I got hooked on it, and I go almost every day when I'm in New York. I find that it really balances me. And also, morning meditation.”

“I don't like rats, but there's not much else I don't like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they're loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I've had them leap out of a lavatory while I've been sitting on it.”