“Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.”

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.

I didn’t feel empty. I wished I’d felt empty. … I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone.

My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.

The meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

People with nothing to declare carry the most.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

If the Qur’an was the word of God, it had been dictated on a very bad day.

The word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of that force, the expression of the word, which is your own life.

Fame – a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.

Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.

How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.

The interviewer should just tell me the words he wants me to say and I’ll repeat them after him. I think that would be so great because I’m so empty I just can’t think of anything to say.

Freedom, Truth, Honour, you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.