I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Be aware of the power of self awareness.

The day when the fire that we had lit in our minds reaches our hearts, we will start turning every person that we come in contact with into ashes. We become the ghosts that we always feared.

Even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

My Illusionist, will you take me into a world filled with timeless magic?

All movies aren't fun some are hard work. You try to do something and convey a set of emotions that have to do with some real life kind of stuff.

You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind- with one thought less, each year.

I believe the human mind is a very fallible thing, but it's the only thing that I can really know, I guess.

My books have three W's on them, which are "words," "wisdom," and "wonder." Words inevitably lead to wisdom, and wisdom inevitably leads to wonder and awe at this phenomenal world around us.

People ask me what's like to hear our song on the radio. I don't know, I don't listen to the radio

A life is made up of a great number of small incidents, and a small number of great ones.