“I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.”

All cultures have been mingled forever.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs.

Most of the time, I’m not even working; I’m just helping people, because I feel that I am too lucky.

Knowing the Truth is Fairly Useless. Feeling it is Profound. Living it Makes All the Difference.

Luxury is feeling unrushed. It is designing a life that allows you to do what you want with high leverage, with many options, all while feeling unrushed.

Whatever you are doing, that which makes you feel the most alive…that is where God is.

Do you ever just add things you’ve already done to your to-do list, then cross them over right away to feel more productive? Me neither.

What people say and feel about you when you’ve left a room is precisely your job while you are in it.

Sometimes it can feel like you aren’t doing anything because you’re no longer doing everything.

I feel all that, your touch your presence your breath but can’t tell if its you I’m looking at.