Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.

Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.

In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others.

all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.