I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

I like to see life with its teeth out.

The BEACH Success System is a process to be used over and over again. It’s not a one-time exercise.

OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.

Every day is a good day and every moment is an auspicious moment.

He who has never experienced hurt cannot experience true love.

With land-roaming animals, I've just read so much about the sophistication of their emotional lives and their intelligence and the way they process information that betrays a greater intelligence.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.

Happiness is a house without a telephone.

Respect gods before demigods, heroes before men, and first among men your parents; but respect yourself most of all.

Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.