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

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician.

It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families

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.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I’m a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I’ve lived my life backwards.

Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.

In life you are either growing or rotting. You’re moving forward or backwards; there is no standing still.

The Dharma Path is to keep walking forward. But the true Dharma has no going forward, no going backward, and no standing still.

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.