I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

I think a certain amount of stress in life is good. The stress of just working, which takes effort – I think it keeps you going.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

I don’t have all the answers.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

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

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

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.

The advice I’ve been giving to people all my life – that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can’t give up politics, it won’t give you up – was the advice I should have been taking myself.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

When I see myself as an old woman, I just think about being happy. And hopefully, I’ll still be fly.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.

When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, ‚What should I do?‘ And I say: ‚Act. Do something.‘ Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

When you are angry or frustrated, what comes out? Whatever it is, it’s a good indication of what you’re made of.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

I let the American people down.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.

Life’s too short to deal with other people’s insecurities.

Be as you wish to seem.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Never take anything for granted.

When the negative thoughts come – and they will; they come to all of us – it’s not enough to just not dwell on it… You’ve got to replace it with a positive thought.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

In this big ball of people, I’m just one grain of sand on this beach.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you’re growing up as a street kid in Toronto.