Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.