I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

Shut your eyes and see.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

Your mind will give back to you exactly what you put into it.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

Jesus Christ-" "Is Not here right now, " the man in black replied, "and even if he were, he could not save you.

It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.

Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.

The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.

Looking back, I should have pursued philosophy and economics and things of that sort in college more, but I didn't.

The first thing the secretary types is the boss.

The romantic artist, off alone in his storm-battered castle, fuming whole worlds from his brain, reflects his culture's most persistent myth, of God creating from a primal loneliness.

I think the genetics of being Irish are that you sort of prefer when it's rainy and cloudy. It's just genetic.

It's always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.

Often I'll go to the market, and women will say to me: "Let me see your shoes." And then I show them I'm wearing flip-flops.