The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol - brighter than my students at university.

The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving's Bracebridge Hall.

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.

Ask the Outsider what he ultimately wants,and he will admit he doesn't know.Why? Because he wants it instinctively,and it is not always possible to tell what your instincts are driving towards.