What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

Then I began to think that it is very true which is commonly said that the one-half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth.

Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.

I am myself a gentleman of the press, and have no other escutcheon.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

With a tongue like a cow, she could make you go wow.

The sense of self is one of the obscurations that prevents us from seeing clearly, the idea that there is a self or that we are anyone in particular.

Sometimes the better an actor is, the less he's noticed.

Meaning, not beauty, is what we are after.

The whole point to life-that you have to experience yourself, but then when you do you realize that you've learned so much from the bad things that sometimes they're better than the good things.

Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.