Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

My life is mine to remember.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

No one but a fool is always right.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I’ve already accomplished something. It’s such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Journalism keeps you planted in the earth.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

The ‚I think‘ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‚I breathe‘ which actually does accompany them.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Sin is geographical.

My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

I’m fascinated by the fact that we can’t grasp anything about time.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

They’re right to think that about me, because I’m the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Changes are not unusual – I mean, most movies, when they release them, they make changes. But somehow, when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ and I don’t know if you remember ‚The Little Mermaid,‘ but it’s dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.