What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.

The past is a pebble in my shoe.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

Give the clergy your sympathy; don't give them anything else.

I never think about what people are going think about me.

I have always been allergic to telephones. As far as I am concerned, they are very seldom time-savers and very often the destroyers of schedules.

In a world of infinite choice if something is not made specifically for me I'm gone.

Dampier is soft. Quote it, underline it, tape it and send it to him.