Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

Dissents speak to a future age.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

The point – the power to hurt – of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

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

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

There are as many opinions as there are experts.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Study men, not historians.

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

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

There is so much that people take for granted.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

The ideas associated with the problems of the development of science, as far as I can see by looking around me, are not of the kind that everyone appreciates.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

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.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Corruption is one of the most common reasons I hear in views that criticize aid.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.