“Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? Corelli asked. 'Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?”

“Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.”

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”

“Normally, the more talent one has, the more one doubts it. And vice versa.”

“Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.”

“Fools talk, cowards silence , wise men listen”

“In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.”