In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don't fall out they let them live another year.

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Individuality is freedom lived.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?

The most dangerous mistake that our souls are capable of, is, to take the creature for God, and earth for heaven (374).

For him who has no concentration there is no tranquility.

People are simply not willing to look at their problems honestly and admit that they have problems.

A lot of people can't stand touring but to me it's like breathing. I do it because I'm driven to do it.

Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

Since you've been gone, I can breath for the first time.

Never underestimate your own strength. You were born for a purpose and are blessed with the power to achieve it.

Truth is often uncomfortable. It is only comforting to those who do not wish to ignore it. Then, truth becomes not only comforting, but inspiring.

Away with the world's opinion of you-it's always unsettled and divided.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.