“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.”

In order to write about life first you must live it.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, all that you’re yet to be.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

I was always a lonely person when I was with everyone.

Intelligence is so damn rare and the people who have it often have such a bad time with it that they get bitter or propagandistic and then it’s not much use.

Religion is the opium of the poor.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

All cowardice comes from not truly loving, or at least, not loving well.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go.

There are worse places to be than on your own.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people they finally dropped it from judo.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests’ books.

We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books that are said to come from heaven. We derive our inspiration, not from heaven, or from an unseen world, but directly from life.

I was reading Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. It’s one of my favourites.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

A good book is an event in my life.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.