“When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.”

People think of education as something that they can finish.

The day you stop learning is the day you begin decaying.

You don’t need to predict the future. Just choose a future – a good future, a useful future – and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about.

The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it’s bad for you.

There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

By regarding ourselves with kindness, we begin to dissolve the identity of an isolated, deficient self. This creates the grounds for including others in an unconditionally loving heart.

Brokenness is a beginning.

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

Purpose is when you know and understand what you were born to accomplish. Vision is when you see it in your mind and begin to imagine it

In dreams begins responsibility.