Nobody knows me.

There are a lot of things I never did, because I believe in watching those true Hollywood stories and I see how easy it is to lose track of your life.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

I am proud of having done what I’ve done. Very proud.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Go on thinking that you don’t need to be read and you’ll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won’t feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

I have never given adoration to any body except myself.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

I kinda live where I find myself.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

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

There’s no such thing as going to a soapbox and saying, ‚The government’s corrupt,‘ and not having the intelligence service see your face. In the digital world, that can be done.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

People don’t usually compliment your character.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

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

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

I don’t like being alone.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

Every man is his own hell.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

My life is mine to remember.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

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.

When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that’s when I think life is over.

I was a thug.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: ‚I never want to be alone.‘ That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

I wanted to have the adoration of John Lennon but have the anonymity of Ringo Starr. I didn’t want to be a frontman. I just wanted to be back there and still be a rock and roll star at the same time.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

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

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.