No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people..

Creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of despotism, coercion and fear..

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by….

A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for..

It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get ou….

Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bu….

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it..

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is….

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves..

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outw….

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more ­effective your writing. We who write in Engl….

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life..

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last..

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe..

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species..

What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it..

Every island to a child is a treasure island..

Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false..

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life..

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a s….

Perfect love may cast our fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love..