Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.
Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.
I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that “other eye,” which we can use to judge ourselves.
Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
What is a hero without love for mankind.
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success.’
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
How boring these emotions are that we’re caught in and can’t get free of, no matter how much we want to...
As you get older, you don’t get wiser. You get irritable.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.