I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.

Umica ka hanuHOLD THE BREATHBe patient

The smell of jasmine makes people tell their secrets

It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.

If souls can suffer alongside, and I hardly know it, because the spirit of discernment is not in me, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Any conclusion you reach about yourself has to be an unseen limitation because there's always more to see.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

I'm angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.

The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain.