Alan Quotes

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

Spontaneity is one of the joys of existence, especially if you prepare for it in advance.

I see myself as a comic but the acting helps sell tickets for gigs.

Violent crime rates fell steadily from 1993 to 2002, and this nearly coincides with the establishment of the community policing program known as the COPS program under the Clinton administration.

I'm more inclined to linger in the science pages of 'The Week' magazine. But my principle obsessions are still watching sitcoms and football.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.

Please, don't go. It's lonely. There's a hole in my head as big as the world and it's so very lonely.

Be who you like as long as you mean it.

The arsenal of megadeath can't be rid no matter what the peace treaties come to.

Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied.

The first plane ride was in a homemade glider my buddy and I built. Unfortunately we didn't get more than four feet off the ground, because it crashed.

Truly, whoever we are, wherever we reside, we exist upon the whim of murderers.

What are you accepting that would not be a part of your ideal day?

Be a creator, not a reactor.

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is

If you act anxiously to hasten your results, you delay their arrival. Calm poise reveals the shortest route home.

London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.

A lot of the critique of our growing mechanization was actually at its strongest, and arguably at its most perceptive, during the late '60s.

Don't try to lose weight. Take delight in gaining fitness.

Be clear on where you are and where you want to go and you will get there. It can be the best year of your life.

I claim my heart's desire, and I choose my direction. I will attain my chosen goal.

You can only see in someone else what you see in yourself.

The cause of poverty is not scarcity. It is fear and small thinking.

All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.

I've got a great life that I really enjoy. But there is something chewing at me inside: that adrenaline rush from football, I miss that.

The ending is nearer than you think, and it is already written. All that we have left to choose is the correct moment to begin.

With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty.

Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.

The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.

You believe that a lover will bring you love, but it is your love that will bring you a lover.

Great masters neither want nor need your worship. Your greatest gift to them and yourself is to emulate their divinity by claiming it as your own.

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air.

The ego tells you to fill space. Your spirit tells you to let space fill you.

If you want to find God, hang out in the space between your thoughts.

The best way to be more like me is to be more like you.

An authentic life does not require anyone else's approval for your creative choices.

You should always choose your associations wisely because people create impressions around the music.

There's something really fun and spooky about that teenage feeling of narcissism or indestructibility, like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.

Acts that proceed from your calm center are always more effective than acts that proceed from fear, guilt, or anger.

The essence of sin is arrogance; the essence of salvation is submission.

I never get bored of my wife. It's lovely.

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.

It's Satan's delight to tell me that once he's got me, he will keep me. But at that moment I can go back to God. And I know that if I confess my sins, God is faithful and just to forgive me.

We live in a time where there's an alienation factor. There's a certain disconnection. We don't have any real sense of community anymore.

When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotizatio n; coming to your senses. But of course to do that, you have to go out of your mind.

The condition of an enlightened mind is a surrendered heart.