The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

I’ve never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a ‚fat cat‘ and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a ‚public-spirited philanthropist‘.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Really, I have to laugh because there was a whole set of stories that made me sound like the Dragon Lady, you know, ‚tough this and tough that.‘ Then there is this business about ‚gooey.‘ The bottom line is I am a pragmatic idealist.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

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

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

Without stirring abroad, One can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window One can see the way of heaven. The further one goes The less one knows.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I’m not an analyzer. I’ve got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don’t analyze people.

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 may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she’d kill me. She thinks I’m selling dope.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

I have to be seen to be believed.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

They say somebody’s ‚street smart.‘ I feel like, if I got intelligence, it’s just a country smart.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

A celebrated people lose dignity upon a closer view.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Some men do think I’m a psycho bunny-boiler.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.