Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

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 politics and a few other things. The history of everything.

All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.

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

If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?