This person called up and said, “You’ve got to come and take this seminar. It will completely change your life in just one weekend.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to completely change my life this weekend. I’ve got a lot of things to do on Monday.”
I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
The situation reached the height of the ludicrous when I suddenly realized one day that of everything I had written about the man I could just as well have written the opposite.
Even a lie is a psychic fact.
Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
One must use a brazen lie to convince people of a reality of a higher and deeper order.
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . but not necessarily in that order.
The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented.
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going.
Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
There is a saying that “paper is more patient than man”; it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days. . . . Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient.
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
A story must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself. My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how his teacher used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour he was cured of his lameness. That’s how to tell a story.
