Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

“Theatre is the most democratic side of literature.”

"The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon."

I was reading.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

"At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher."

"A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption. A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense."

"Don't get it right, get it written."

"A poor writer is one who names rather than represents."

"Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times."