Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes.

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.

The biographer who writes the life of his subjects self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.

Why do women always do this? Why are they so eager to blame themselves when someone treats them like sh*t? A guy would take a cheese grater to his tongue before admitting he screwed up.

At Barca, players were banned from driving their sports cars to training.

Don't live beyond your means. Don't buy more than you can pay for. Don't expect to get rich quick. And don't confuse salesmen for friends or advisers.

The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.

Without Scientology, I would be in an alley somewhere looking for dope.

If I were in the Beatles, I'd be a good George Harrison.

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

You don't. It doesn't work. One day, you wake up, and you've learned how to store it, and you go to another part of the heart.

This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received actual instructions on where to go and what to do.