“A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto,… not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.”

“We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other… except through faith.”

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.”

“Ain’t nothing an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one.”

“People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen.”

“One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.”

“If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. …What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea… to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]…”

“Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

“I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”