"Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but generally speaking at the graduate level or higher it doesn't. One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics."

"You cannot know at all what will comes out of you because all your knowledge is running otherwise. What you do not know and what you thought that there would not come at all, that comes out and appear…"

"It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent."

"People who get to the top of any organisation are generally dysfunctional human beings who are overachieving, overcompensating or overbearing."

"I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."