How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.

The single raindrop never feels responsible for the flood.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

It is easier for a woman to defend her virtue against men than her reputation against women.

I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.

The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry - it just gets dirtier.

Shantaram is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to Shantaram, the first a prequel.

The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

Endings are always the beginnings of something else

No nation can be destroyed while it possesses a good home life.

We are all members of the same great family ... On social occasions the formality of strictly military occasions should be relaxed, and a spirit of friendliness and goodwill should prevail.

As part of my efforts to fight identity theft, I worked with my colleagues on the Financial Services Committee to strengthen consumer protection with a reasonable notification requirement.