Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge.

An educated person must learn to act justly, beginning, first of all, with his thoughts, then later in his deeds. That is what it means to be educated.

It's proper that people have friends, friendships without self-interest. Without friends, life is too lonely.

You must first of all think justly. Don’t sit in judgment over others when you don’t know the truth of the matter.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Let us see whether it is the New Order or me who will be the loser before Indonesian history. I have won. The New Order has fallen and my writings have been translated into 40 languages.

Painting is literature in colors. Literature is painting in language.

The love I knew was from books.

Every book that is banned is a badge of honor.

I'll do as I please. My mind is not to be imprisoned.

Among the Kimbrii the greatest shame a person can bring to himself or his clan is to start a war, but the second greatest is to submit to tyranny or injustice without a fight.

To decide to quit on yourself, is to be willing to settle for the pain that comes with every big regret.

Religion, like water, may be free, but when they pipe it to you, you've got to help pay for the piping. And the piper.

One reason I quit doing interviews after years and years and years was because I was making things up.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

Success lasts only three seconds. After that you're the same as you were before you had it.

How can Benedict Arnold be reliable in what he says?

Yeah, spray tans are not for me.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Why didn't someone tell me that I can become a Christian and settle the doubts afterward?