I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.?

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Don't send me flowers when I'm dead. If you like me, send them while I'm alive.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

It is wonderful when you don't have the fear, and a lot of the time I don't ... I focus on what needs to be done instead.

I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.

Most ballet teachers in the United States are terrible. If they were in medicine, everyone would be poisoned.

Anything that makes weak - physically, intellectually and spiritually, reject it as poison.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

Radical simply means 'grasping things at the root'.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Memory... is an internal rumour.