“The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn’t so funny.”

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.

Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.

To be free is to have achieved your life.

A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

The name of a person you love is more than language.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

All creative work, all life in a sense, is a cri de coeur.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!

Take one step backward into the unknown.

It’s like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we’ll be going backward.

There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.

If everybody floated with the tide of talk, placidity would soon end in stagnation. It is the strong backward stroke which stirs the ripples, and gives animation and variety.

There are those who say that children make a rich man poor. No, they have it backward.

It won’t be decided in one election, but it is a basic choice between an open and progressive Iraq and one that is backward and continues to fall behind.

Only I can’t do them so I ended up on my ass followed by the most unsightly backward roll out of it, followed by the cast falling over in laughter and a good portion of the audience too.

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.