Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

I have noticed... that men usually leave married women alone and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women.

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes... can no longer be of concern to great powers alone.

I may climb perhaps to no great heights but I will climb alone.

I think the greatest amount of pressure is the pressure I place on myself. So in a way I chose to be alone.

In Genesis it says that it is not good for a man to be alone but sometimes it is a great relief.

I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create.

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

I'd always thought the Rats were good fun but one of the very nice things about being of Saga age is that I can actually look back and think When I was younger I was in a great band. It was always a collective thing.

Well Jeff Buckley for me is one of the greatest singers I've ever heard. And the reason why is he has an amazing range amazing emotional power in his voice. And the music he put around it also just had this passion and this soul to it and this spirit to it that very few artists have and he passed at a very young age.

The great thing about arriving at this age is that I don't even care about my career anymore.

You live in a deranged age more deranged that usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

It's not always possible to sit down and eat at home in this day and age of fast-paced living but if you are going to eat out do so as a family and support all the great local places in your areas. I'll still eat at the same diner I did as a kid with my parents.

Despite what anti-aging ads say growing older can be better. I feel better in my skin 100 percent. You have greater effects of gravity but the better sense of yourself you have is something I wouldn't trade. Women who lie about their age - 'why?'

Maybe back in the day you didn't need to be the greatest looking to be on TV and you didn't need to speak the best but in this day and age I think you need to be the package. You need to look the part for your sponsors you need to be able to speak the part for the media and to big CEOs.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

One of the great challenges of our age in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

A truly great book should be read in youth again in maturity and once more in old age as a fine building should be seen by morning light at noon and by moonlight.

I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.