“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

I’ve never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn’t have a price tag on the other side.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

Conquered people tend to be witty.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.

The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it – they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

Base your happiness on being real, not on illusions and expectations.

Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

Our society nurtures the illusion that all the rewards go to the people who are perfect. But many of us are finding out that trying to be perfect is costly.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.

The secret to film is that it’s an illusion.

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.