“The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.”

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.

I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.

I created this ‘ideal America.’ Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, ‘Oh, I don’t belong here, either.’

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.