Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

God pity the poor novelist.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.

I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.

Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.

I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.

His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.

We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

I was a great dreamer of day dreams.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Every great mind seeks to labor for eternity. All men are captivated by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by the prospect of distant good.

All great achievements are the result of sustained focus over time-all of them.

You've got to love this business. You have to be able to take rejection.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

I'm just a natural flirt, but I don't see it in a sexual way. A lot of the time I'm like an overexcited puppy.

Unemployment in America today is too high. And part of the reason, unfortunately, is that many companies cannot fill the high-skilled jobs increasingly at risk of going overseas.

[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".

I love good and pleasure, I hate evil and pain, I want to be happy and I am not mistaken in believing, that people, angels and even demons have those same inclinations.