For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Older and wiser voices can help you find the right path, if you are only willing to listen.

I have wanted to fly into space for many years, but never imagined it would really be feasible.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

I don’t look at a man who’s expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

If you young fellows were wise, the devil couldn’t do anything to you, but since you aren’t wise, you need us who are old.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

There is no way I would ask others to go on a Virgin Galactic flight if I didn’t feel it was safe enough for myself.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

When somewhat at a distance, I cannot hear the high tones of instruments, voices. In speaking, it is not surprising that there are people who have never noticed it, for as a rule I am absent-minded, and they account for it in that way.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I’ve had a lot of experience with that.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

A person hears only what they understand.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

To share the dressing room of club and country with Bhai was an amazing experience. I learnt a lot from him and other senior players like Renedy Singh.

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

I’ve been away since I was pretty much eight, traveling to the car tracks, and then going to Europe and traveling more.

It will be a killer, and a chiller, and a thriller, when I get the gorilla in Manila.

I’m a career prosecutor. I have been trained, and my experience over decades, is to make decisions after a review of the evidence and the facts. And not to jump up with grand gestures before I’ve done that. Some might interpret that as being cautious. I would tell you that’s just responsible.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

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.