People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

My memories are like a shuffled deck of cards, each one coming up at random.

Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.

Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.

A sexy picture can come from anyone who forms an intimacy with their subject. You can take a sexy picture of your cat if you want to.

Selflessness implies fun. Its fun to be free. Freedom is inner stillness and not being haunted by your desires, your fears, your aggressive tendencies ... it's being cool.

You try not to have a favorite when you have sons or kids. Can't have a favorite. Can't let them know know if you do. I don't. I treat my main son and the other two exactly the same way.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

I haven't got one or two people that I aspired to be like.