Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

Music is only love looking for words.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of it's inhabitants.

I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

Brazil is bigger than Europe wilder than Africa and weirder than Baffin Land.

I dont believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there but which he has not experienced.

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper or at least not about love.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you...

Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Doorman - a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

Genius is essentially creative; it bears the stamp of the individual who possesses it.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

God gives talent. Work transforms talent into genius.