“the great advantage of really contemporary fiction is that one finds oneself mirror on every page”

“One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.”

“Some drink to forget, I drink to remember. I drink in order to understand what I mean and to discover what I know. Under its benign influence all the stories and dramas which properly belong to the...”

“absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I...”

“But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic perso...”

“Women, of their nature, crave for liberty; they will not be ordered around like servants.”

“I closed my eyes and turned my face into the cold wind. When I felt it swept along my skin there was no past. No future. Just now.”

“The Universe is very, very big.It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.Not you or your family or your house or your planet or...”

“Everything in ...nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a. ..visible outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness. ..from it, we fin...”

“Every hour, stop and ask: Am I really present in this moment? If not, what are my thoughts focused on? Doing this often will help you return to the present moment.”

“Weird, even for one of us. Or maybe she's worse.""Worse how?""Normal.”