“So, how bad of an idea is it to go there? On a scale of cooking-whithout-a-shirt to being-an-evil-priest-in-an-Alexandre-Dumas-book?”

“Pardon me, Highness, a women waits whithout." "Whithout what?”

“so, what happened next will have to go down in my book of Bad Decisions, planted firmly in the chapter entitled, I have no idea what I was thinking”

“Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …”

“There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.”

“Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling occupation.”