Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.

The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.

The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America.

The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.

The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.

In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he’d met on the internet.

It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life.

Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.

The most stupid religion is Islam.

People appeared to have no clue how truly horrible they were.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

To make a man a saint, it must indeed be by grace; and whoever doubts this does not know what a saint is, or a man.

Nothing has more power to transform than awareness. When you become complete inside yourself, the worst conditions don't matter.

Fortune may crowd a man's life with fortunate circumstances and happy opportunities, but they will, as we all know, avail him nothing unless he makes a wise and vigorous use of them.

Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration - courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

Sometimes I think the human heart is just a simple shelf. There is only so much you can pile onto it before something falls off an edge and you are left to pick up the pieces.

I think some of this fascination with the 'Arab Spring' is just a grand experiment with Israel's survival.

Canada is either an idea or it does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of a great empire.

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.