““Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e. g., from Balzac, without any help from life.”

“To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.”

“As one who fought in all of Israel's wars, and learned from personal experience that without proper force, we do not have a chance of surviving in this region, which does not show mercy towards the weak, I have also learned from experience that the sword alone cannot decide this bitter dispute in this land.”

“It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology”

“Evolution actually involves much more than life arising from non-life by natural means. Evolution really does away with God, and thus allows people to explain their existence without any supernatural being involved.”

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”

“This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best.”

“My father obtained the rights to the E-meter in 1952 from Volney Mathison in the same manner that he does everything— through fraud and coercion. My father learned about the E-meter from Mathison who developed it and my father fraudulently extracted those rights from Mathison so that my father could use it in Scientology auditing.”

“While it is wise to learn from experience, it is wiser to learn from the experiences of others.”

“We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”