For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, they did it by killing all those who opposed them. If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
Charisma is the ability to influence without logic.
The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.
A fair share of anything is starvation diet to an egomaniac.
If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.
I now realize that education is a last wild effort on the part of the authorities to prevent an overdose of leisure from driving the world mad. Learning is no longer an improver; it is merely the most expensive time-filler the world has ever known.
Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.
I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.
Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone – but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.
Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.