Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.