How we flounder when emotion overtakes us.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

The world is always in movement.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

I am loving and joyful because I think I am.

Money can buy popularity, but it can never buy greatness. Your decisions and actions speak louder than everything else.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

Some must delve when the dawn is nigh; Some must toil when the noonday beams; But when might comes, and the soft winds sigh, Every man is a King of Dreams.

To think confidently, act confidently... Act the way you want to feel.

In my ideal world there would be 99% unemployment for actors, and I would be the 1% that's employed. I hear about somebody getting a job at Starbucks and I get jealous.

Our very living is selling. We are all salespeople.

O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts. Possess them not with fear.