Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

The air itself was ebony, like the denial, the refutation, of the idea of light.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

So if you ever felt something behind you, when you weren't even one, like welcome heat, like a bulb, like a sun, trying to shine right across the universe - it was me. Always me. It was me. It was me.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.

Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

Don't I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Baywater Road.

Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.

When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

He was in a terrible state- that of consciousness.