For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

I want to empasize that rape is about human beings, not statistics.

I could have played another year, but I would have been playing for the money, and baseball deserves better than that.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

More astronauts have been to the moon than farmers who paid the inheritance tax in 2013.

I'm enjoying simplifying things.

But our minds are bound to the yardstick of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and with that yardstick we try to inquire into the unknown, to measure that which is not measurable.

God's jokes are the soul's curriculum.

When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work.