Turning on the light is easy if you know where the switch is.

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

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of.