A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

An empty mind can become an angel’s paradise! Only if you block negativity.

I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.

When Big Meech and everybody got indicted, hustling died. Keep it trill.

There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.

I can be a very valuable friend to you, but you do not want me as an enemy.

Every single moment of reality instantly turns into memories; reality can not be caught; we can only catch memories.

You make mistakes and you learn from them.

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.