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

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.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.