More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations..

It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him..

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only m….

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people..

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of exp….

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity..

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story..

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story..

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene..

Self knowledge is always bad news..

Though life's tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn..

The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world..

Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist..

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and a….

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back..

My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the….

I don't see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it's going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so f….

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion..

I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclin….

You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politic….

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes..