It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

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.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

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

I don’t feel I’ve had a decent critic ever on the East coast.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

There is no unique picture of reality.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

The very phrase ‚foreign affairs‘ makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

I had a much better view with the halo than I expected.

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.

So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

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

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

I don’t know that my schooling was conducive to wild ideas and creativity, but it gave me discipline, drive. They taught me how to think. I really know how to think.

It’s the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

Experts often possess more data than judgment.

Everything popular is wrong.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Religion is just mind control.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.