Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

I have discovered that my freedom is within me, and nothing can destroy it.

For in spite of the snapdragons and the duty millers and the cherry blossoms, it was always winter.

I am not really a writer. I am just someone who is haunted, and I will write the hauntings down.

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.

Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

I like to see life with its teeth out.

Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.

Death is but an aspect of life, and the destruction of one material form is but a prelude to building up of another.

It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.

I've never changed my life since I was 4 and went to the YMCA with a gym bag. I still have that philosophy. In fact, I still have that gym bag.

Perfume is like a personal signature, which is why I like to mix my own. For years I've paired Femme by Rochas with Shalimar and love the results.

For the most part, however, Lady in the Water comes across as a movie that's too bad to be good, and not bad enough to be so bad that it's good.

Relationships don't thrive because the guilty are punished but because the innocent are merciful.

We would root out terrorism if the BSP comes to the centre

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis.