Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.

Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

The important thing for any writer to remember is to take the writing seriously, but not the writer.

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

It’s free to feed your mind and your mind feeds your body

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

I'm convinced in 100 years Obama will have an important place in the civic pantheon of American life.

I have no political aspirations. Thats it.

In a weird way scientists understand things on a higher level but it takes a lot of dedication and a lot of time.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

To sing is to pray twice.

I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything. People want to blog for a variety of reasons, and that may or may not be representative.