In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Leaning his forehead against Michael's, Dominic admitted, "I didn't dance then. I think I was waiting for you.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?

My dad would go to work every day and write in a room full of funny people. He enjoyed it. I know great writers who find the process agonising but to me, writing has always been sheer joy.

I felt like I kind of got to know [Elvis Presley], and got a little peek inside what was going on there. That was pretty amazing.

The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.

What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.

sooner or later I do what I want to do.

When you are infinitely indebted for your body, for Knowledge, for things you have received, and for your own life, then you bask in the abundance of the Creator

How do you tell somebody how to find what they're looking for when ten years ago you came from the same place, and have yet to find it yourself?