A motto of many politicians, public servants and money bags: Ask not 'What can I do for you?' but 'What can I do you for?

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.

The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.

The work is with me when I wake up in the morning; it is with me while I eat my breakfast in bed and run through the newspaper, while I shave and bathe and dress.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.

A life lived without borders is a life lived in captivity

Life is like The Muppet Show, but instead of Muppets there's anxiety.

Facts that challenge basic assumptions-and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem-are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them.

One of my proudest moments is I didn't sell my soul for the sake of popularity.

Institutional practices, it seems, perpetuate themselves mostly by their invisibility.

You know what I want, above all things? I want people who are aware of my music right now, to believe in change.

An occultation of Venus is not half so difficult as an eclipse of the sun, but because it comes seldom the world thinks it's a grand thing.

Try to be surprised by something every day.

I may have smoked too much weed, but I wasn't taking drugs or anything.

Modesty never rages, never murmurs, never pouts; when it is ill-treated, it pines, it beseeches, it languishes.