People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

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.

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

The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.

Puberty corrupts - that’s a fact, and it corrupts without consent – that’s the concern.

Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great generous and true without it we are little false and mean.

I unfortunately don't have a stage name, I don't have a celebrity that I can hide behind, so every time I show my ID at an airport person or get carded at a bar, it's always interesting.

The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

It's wrong to put the drug lobby's interests ahead of older Americans.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.