If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

The act of extending forgiveness and asking for forgiveness must come from our heart.

All work done with love is healing work.

If you have intercourse you run the risk of dying and the ramifications of death are final.

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

It is more difficult to manipulate with film than, for instance, video. The problem with video is that it gives you a thousand possibilities.

Knowledge is the only water which makes one thirsty when it is drunk.

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.

People see me on the court only as a superhero, grunting and winning. They think you're a robot, and I'm not.

Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.

Golf is a great way for someone to learn discipline, responsibility and sportsmanship.?