being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.

So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.

That's when I realized the chill wasn't coming from outside—it was coming from within me.

Silence, beautiful voice.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

I have the talent and the tools to win.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

There is no wilderness. There is only our inability to fill the emptiness in which we live.

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.