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

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

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.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

It is necessary to analyze all the restricting beliefs and complexes, which we acquired in childhood, from family, school and society

We were not born with a purpose of marrying and giving life to a son-animals are able to have children too and they can have many more children than we do

Tally wondered if you could talk somebody out of their brain damage.

Nations, great nations have limitations. All nations have limitations. Even great powers have limitations.

It is no use lying to one's self.

... it is highly unlikely that a structural derangement could produce pain equal in severity to acute muscle spasm.

She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body.

Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.

All of us admire people we don't like and like people we don't admire.

For music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.