There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.

I cannot express how lordly and transfigured I felt at that moment. I was a prince of that harbor, a porpoise king - slim among the buoys and the water traffic.

They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.

When you took a man's job away from him, his ability to feed and clothe his family, that man was going to get angry.

He would have liked to know that somebody wanted to keep him alive, that someone remembered him. He used to say that we exist as long as somebody remembers us.

No woman ever falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves.

Time has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it.

The most depraved type of human being ... (is) the man without a purpose.

Here is the one truth you know for sure: there is no truth for sure.

As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

Apparently, word of the chicken man incident hadn’t spread quite yet.