Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

I've always believed that a writer has got to remain an outsider. If I was offered anything like the Nobel Prize for Literature, I'd find it an extremely difficult conflict because I'd be basically disinclined to accept.

Could it be that sexual perversion and romanticism sprang from the same longing for distant horizons?

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.

Simple perception then is a fallacy. Besides the conscious prejudices that we are aware of imposing on the world, there are a thousand subconscious prejudices that we assume to be actuality.