A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

The jester is brother to the sage.

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

I believe that the evidence for telepathy is overwhelming and that it is a part of reality that is above science. Science allows us to glimpse [only] fragments of reality.

All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.

I happened to come along in the music business when there was no trend.

We need a bold, new, positive vision for the future of our country.

I don't think the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban will yield a positive result

There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.

The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.

I have little faith in the theory that organized killing is the best prelude to peace.

When you are obliged to make a statement that you know will cause displeasure, you must say it with every appearance of sincerity; this is the only way to make it palatable.

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Extend an act of kindness each day. No one has to know. It can be a smile, reassuring words, a small favor - without expecting something in return.