...I expected a gift, you know, something nice and useless...

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.

In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without even Freudian motivations.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.

A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.

I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias.

Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness.

Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.

The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.

What you give today you get tomorrow.

I'm the one in the band that said I'm not going on tour unless we do a record.

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

To leave Afghanistan as a playground for terrorists and adventurers was simply not possible anymore.

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.

Right after I graduated, my girlfriend, who I had been going out with for five years, dumped me, and my grandmother died.

Private enterprise manages better all that to which it is equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society.

First your legs go. Then you lose your reflexes. Then you lose your friends