I wanted to, you know, get my story out in the world, which, it turns out, is a very misguided notion.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Happiness is not in the amount of money we make ……it is in the good things we do to better mankind.

California is a place of invention, a place of courage, a place of vision, a place of the future. People who made California what it is were willing to take risks, think outside convention and build.

Let me say first that reading is my favorite pastime, bar none. If I couldn't read, I don't know what I'd do. But as a writer, it's both a blessing and a curse. You absorb technique as you go along.

The body whips the soul. In its great desire it demands the elixir In the roar of spring, transmutations.

The UN structure is one-sided, stacked against the world of Islam.

Ennui, the parent of expensive and ruinous vices.

The only regrets I have are rather prosaic - like I wish I went for a swim in the Pacific.

As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

When we cannot use the compass of mathematics or the torch of experience...it is certain we cannot take a single step forward.