“Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happ...”

“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barel...”

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

“Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true...”

“False judges are held up in the worlds admiration and I alone know the true ones.”

“He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human comm...”

“I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Ive said before, bugs in amber.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!”

“The day stared back an empty gray, with not a speck of white to give character to the lifeless sky.”

“When you are in trouble, you are the nearest first person who can help you!”

“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in mens minds, perhaps f...”

“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”

“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives deligh...”