When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Time is how you spend your love.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

Sung Win smiled to himself, enjoying the tension across his shoulders and the way his pulse beat in his veins. All life involved risk.

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

Remind yourself that problems come not to obstruct, but to instruct.

Assuming that we have trained our imagination to denounce the past, we will not suffer much from unfulfilled wishes.

I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I'm morally culpable for what's occurring because I'm the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.

I'm lucky that so many children visit my website. At least I get to talk with them that way.

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

By all implies marry if you get a great wife/husband, you are going to be pleased. If you get a bad a single, you are going to become a philosopher.

What people in Burma need is a democratic federal Burma that guarantees autonomy, rights and protection for all, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion or race.