“Success is somebody else’s failure.”

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.

Anyone else has to come upstairs and see the Shogun. I’m still the Shogun.

Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.

Maybe it’s true that life begins at fifty. But everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

And I want to do it the right way, like everybody else, not just a famous figurehead that gets a job because he is a famous basketball player. I want to really learn the business.

I go train, and like with Conan, I’m in leather, and with Drogo, I’m in leather or armor or something else. I’m not in my adidas sweat suit or my matching tracksuit pants to go work out. I got too busy of a day. I’ve got my boots.

The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

Guys like Larry Bird — he played so hard, he wants everybody else to play hard. That’s not unreasonable. Any coach would want that and demand that.

I have no problem whatsoever with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else.