When I heard the news that Steve Jobs had died, my mind flashed back to 1985, when I began my love affair with computers. I was stationed in Moscow for The Associated Press, and I ordered an Apple IIc - by Telex - from a department store in Helsinki, Finland. They express-shipped it to me, a month later, by train.

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

My birthday is generally a very quiet affair.

I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe everything will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about.

Cherish sunsets, wild creatures and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

I'm in love with lots of different things. I do love love, though. I don't think love should make you feel uneasy. When you feel sick, I don't think that's love - that's infatuation. Someone who makes you feel like that is exciting - it's the one that you imagine when you think of an amazing affair - but that's not actually a stable love.

'Infernal Affairs' is really amazing and was a really popular movie. I would be fine with playing any character in the movie.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Make time for yourself. Diligently. Purposefully. Daily. The affairs of the world will go on forever ? even long after you are gone. But do you want to die having lived a Life that you wish you had rather not lived at all? If you want to live a different Life, you need to make time for yourself. Now!

I don't particularly believe all love is doomed. But I guess, one is usually kinda suffering from some aborted love affair or association, rather than being at the peak of one. I think it's fairly obvious that a lot more suffering goes on in the name of love than the little happiness you can squeeze out of it.

From the pastor who has an affair with his secretary, to the jerk at the office who happens to be a deacon, to the overbearing boss who can't miss his Monday night Bible study, Christians today cause more problems for the gospel than all the devil's demons put together.

There's a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads onto fortune, omitted, all their voyages end in shallows and miseries. Upon such tide are we now...

I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months?Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

We are the decisive factor in the affairs of the universe.

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish.

On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

I can't over-emphasize how important an exquisite perfume is, to be wrapped and cradled in an enchanting scent upon your skin is a magic all on its own! The notes in that precious liquid will remind you that you love yourself and will tell other people that they ought to love you because you know that you're worth it. The love affair created by a good perfume between you and other people, you and nature, you and yourself, you and your memories and anticipations and hopes and dreams; it is all too beautiful a thing!

It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.

Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the Gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.