The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I’ve already accomplished something. It’s such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don’t know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

It’s hard to be humble, when you’re as great as I am.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it’s a continuing choice.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts.

My public is growing up just as I am. After all, I’m not 19 anymore and if I stick with the sex bit, who will be paying to see me when I’m 50?

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a ‚have-not,‘ but I knew that I wasn’t.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

We’ve got to dumb America up again.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

The self is hateful.

I have my flaws too, but I am a professional who doesn’t like to miss or lose.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

I cannot live without books.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

I’m the most stubborn person I know.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

As for hobbies, I don’t really read or watch TV.

Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

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.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I have trouble with letting go. That’s my problem.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Now is the winter of our discontent.