I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.

You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.

England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place ... an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.

Without love, most of life remains concealed. Nothing is as fascinating as love, unfortunately.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

As for man, his days are numbered, whatever he might do, it is but wind.

The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there's a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn't.

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.

I want everybody to travel, to travel and not be afraid.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn't so much the worse for you.

It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.

Some people won't even own a dog for fear it will die - you can't bubble-wrap your heart.

Why can't you just get married in Las Vegas like normal Americans?