It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

Las personas con un alto nivel de tolerancia al aburrimiento tienen tiempo de sobra para pensar.

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, and till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, for then she never looks upon her lure.