“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Dancers don’t get invited to visit people. It is assumed a boy dancer will run off with the spoons and a girl with the head of the house.

Books aren’t just made of words they’re also filled with places to visit and people to meet.

As I go across the country and privately visit women’s shelters and counselling centres.

I’ll never forget reading Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end

Feelings are just visitors, let them come and go.

I’d known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn’t be possible, since it’s illegal for them to speak with foreigners.

Future is an unknown country which requires tough visas for anyone to enter. Not all of us will get the chance to visit it.

For the rest of my life you’ll visit my dreams, the only place we exist.