Well, aren’t you just saying it’s better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it’s a question of one’s humanity.

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can’t understand it.

I’ve often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

Why is it that married people always say “Come in” when everything they do says “Get out”? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you’re unmarried.

There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.

The better class of Briton likes to send his children away to school until they’re old and intelligent enough to come home again. Then they’re too old and intelligent to want to.

One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

Most beds aren’t as intimate as people think they are.