I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

I love teaching.

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

So though there are many things I would have done differently, I submit to God's sovereignty and His purpose in my life and I thank Him that He brought me the way He brought me and gave me what He gave me when He thought I could handle it.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating enough.

Under HB 2655, the state is responsible to ensure parents are aware of the purpose and value of assessments and receive notice from their local school districts about their rights and obligations. Educators must engage with parents about the value of assessment and the potential consequences if parents opt out and student participation diminishes.

He who is humble is confident and wise. He who brags is insecure and lacking.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.

Amsterdam is not Holland. It is a city that attracts people from all over Holland. And lots of international tourists and party people.

I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it.

My faith doesn't go over real well in Hollywood.

I don't like to have time on my wall; it's too-in-your-face.

On 'Scandal,' they've proven that they're not scared of shocking the audience.

I tell it like it is, but I don't voice my opinion unless it's asked for.

It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.

For me, getting comfortable with being famous was hard - that whole side of it, the loss of anonymity, the loss of privacy. Giving up that part of your life and not having control of it.

We in the U.A.E. have no such word as 'impossible'; it does not exist in our lexicon. Such a word is used by the lazy and the weak, who fear challenges and progress.

Hallmark makes beautiful films that feel as if they should be watched in a theater. The Hall family knows the power of stories, and they give us unforgettable movies with heart and depth and the resonance of classics.

True friends are never apart. Maybe in distance, but never in heart.

My production got better, songs, lyrics, everything; the sound, the quality, everything.