“I’m sure you have a theme: the theme of your life. You can embellish it or desecrate it, but it’s your theme, and as long as you follow it, you will experience harmony and peace of mind.”

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.

You don’t realize what fine fighting material there is in age. You show me any one who’s lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter – someone who’s got the will to live.

Assumptions are dangerous things.

But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them.

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play…but when you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.

Traveling around in a little tin box isolates one from the people and the atmosphere of the place in a way that I have never experienced before.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.

Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.