“Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.”

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.

The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

We should look to the mind, and not to the outward appearance.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Many men who transgress justice, honor appearance over reality.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

There are more important things than outward appearance. No amount of makeup can cover an ugly personality.

I don’t understand referees. It appears like some players can’t even be touched, but in my case, everyone can hit me as hard as they can.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?