It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

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.

Why was it that women were expected to restrain our every passion for the sake of propriety, but men couldn't do it even for the sake of the women they loved?

One can find traces of every life in each life.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I've done a lot of complaining here, but of all the things I've complained about, I can't complain about my life.

I have the most beautiful daughter in the world and I'm grateful for her.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.

Spiritual evolution is part of every soul's destiny on Earth, and each soul grows and evolves at a different rate. You are right where you need to be.

Good. If you checked your e-mail every five minutes, or keep texting and Tweeting in the middle of our conversation, I might snap your neck out of sheer principle.

Mistakes are made on two counts: an argument is either based on error or incorrectly developed.