Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: ‚If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin.‘ But if it’s open and you’re walkin‘ by, feel free to say, ‚Hello.‘

I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

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

There are folks who now know black families – like the Johnsons on ‚Black-ish‘ or the folks on ‚Modern Family.‘ They become part of who you are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you laugh, and they change how you see the world.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

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.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

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

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

There is so much that people take for granted.

My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world.

Every wall is a door.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

It is unnecessary to say that Fidel Castro possesses the high qualities of a fighter and statesman: our path, our struggle, and our triumph we owed to his vision.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.