“Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.”

When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

Don’t get mad. Get everything. – (on divorce).

The woman is the reflection of her man. If you love her to the point of madness, she will become it.

There is A madman inside of you Who is always running for office.

The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.

I eat football, I sleep football. I am not mad I am just passionate.

Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.

And men, whose reason long was blind, From cells of madness unconfined, Oft lose whole years of darker mind.

There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.