I am ugly. I am black inside, rotting and putrid.

He’s drowning, suffocating under the weight of my darkness and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

I will not go back. I may stumble, but I will not fall.

A sad lesson that was mine to learn is that you can't lose what was never truly yours. Nor can you hold to things that simply do not wish to be held.

This is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

The new religion without any secrets is philosophy. The old religion, said Aristotle, is necessary only for the uneducated; Confucius, Buddha, Voltaire and Lessing were of the same opinion.

We live in an ironic society where even play is turned into work. But the highest existence is not work; the highest level of existence is play.

Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.

I confess. If the law had been appiled to me properly for what I did in Vietnam, I'd have been convicted for high treason.

There is no solution, for there is no problem.

Stand up and walk out of your history

I've been writing for decades that balance is an inapt metaphor as it necessarily entails tradeoffs.