“Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”

You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Negotiation talks are the best way to solve anything. We must replace wars and weapons with negotiations and talks.

When I say that I am opposed to this budget, everyone says, “Well, what do you think the United States should do?” My response is, “Why should the United States do anything?”

Life is precious. We should not take anything for granted.

To define Buddhism without a lot of words and phrases, we can simply say, ‘Don’t cling or hold on to anything. Harmonize with actuality, with things as they are.’

Whenever we feel that we are definitely right, so much so that we refuse to open up to anything or anybody else, right there we are wrong. It becomes wrong view.

The empty mind – the pure mind – is not a blank, zero-land, where you’re not feeling or caring about anything.

We do it, not with desire, but with letting go. If you want anything, you wont find it.

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened.