We should not be just a fan of dragons; we should always be the dragon himself. Then we will not be afraid of any dragon.

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.", September 14, 1958)

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

Books can change the world. They represent a second chance for those that want to change their life and can’t.

I'd rather see your honest pain than a brave front.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964

As a kid I was into horror. I loved horror. Horror was huge. I was always into horror. Goosebumps for me was massive growing up. Horror for me was always a big thing.

Music and text have several commonalities, and one is meter and rhythm. Both spoken word and music have certain regularities, and they can be sub-divided rhythmically.

Birds are settling down for the night, singing lullabies to their young.

What people should understand is that I adore the Labour party.