The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.