In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

It is fatal to forget the Law's of God.

Just because you work, doesn't mean you're working on the right thing.

We don't measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him.

the only way to tolerate the thought of her mother sleeping with that man was to get drunk-very drunk.

writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.

Unless you're doing some kind of God conscious thing and you know that He's the one who's really in charge, you're just building up a lot of karma and not really helping yourself or anybody else.

One of the secrets to success is ideas mixed with inspiration

Right now I don't call it the menopause, I call it men-on-pause.

Never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor.

Dali was Renaissance man converted to psychoanalysis.