But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

You're not like the others. I've seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon.

The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.