The problem of pretending to be alive.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content: the quiet mind is richer than a crown.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

If you lose money in business, you can still cover up the loss. If you lose time, the only thing you have by your side is wreckage.

When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy.

A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

I'm just starting to scratch the surface of what really makes me happy and it's taken me a while to admit that acting like a little child and being a jerk and a punk is fun.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

Terror is nothing more than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible.

I have no fear of the Hereafter. An orthodox hell could hardly be more torture than my life has been.

I kind of felt I left a good message and memory with the people in terms of my work, and I always felt with a good record, I could always come back.

We would be foolish and silly not to unite with people in the public health sector, the environmental community, [and] unions, to try to challenge corporate agriculture.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.