There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

It’s sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

Wisdom stands at the turn in the road and calls upon us publicly, but we consider it false and despise its adherents.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

I don’t want people to think of me as sexy.

Vanity is but the surface.

What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

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

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

If someone offers you a breath mint, accept it.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn’t have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

I think the American people, with some justification, think that most politicians live in la-la land.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

Things ain’t what they used to be and never were.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

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

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

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Science is nothing but perception.

Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

In too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear. Through initiatives like My Brother’s Keeper, I’m personally committed to changing both perception and reality.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

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

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!

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I’ve always thought it isn’t that different from everybody else’s.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.