Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.