Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Reality is a sliding door.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

God is, even though the whole world deny him. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

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

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg’s period. Excuse me, but that’s where it was at.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

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

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.