A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.

I keep thinking I should get a phone, because everyone's got one and it becomes increasingly difficult to exist in a society where everyone else has moved ahead and you haven't.

I don't find music being less important than, like, politics.

Life is a constant back-and-forth. We take a breath in and then we breathe out. The same is true for the culture as a whole.

For me, my mother is everything.

I want to do more sci-fi films. I want to play half-alien, half-illegal alien.

I just do what I'm here for and that's to make that music.

We have bodies. We have personalities. We have histories, stories and experiences. But we are not those things - we are Spirit.