We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Who, being loved, is poor?

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

My philosophy is, it’s always very rewarding when you can make an audience laugh. I don’t mind making fun of myself. I like self-deprecating comedy. But I’d like you to laugh with me occasionally, too.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

When anyone has the power to destroy the whole human race in a matter of hours, it becomes a moral issue. The church must speak out.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

That government is best which governs least.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

Information is not knowledge.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‚Republic,‘ and then I had to go over that five times or something.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

You fail only if you stop writing.