Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.

Most people really have no problem with the idea of a creator God. Their question is just what is this God like, how can I know about him, how can I know him.

God is the partner of our most intimate soliloquies. That is to say, whenever you are talking to yourself in utmost sincerity and ultimate solitude--he to whom you are addressing yourself may justifiably be called God.

In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

Clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude.

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

The lake of my mind, unbroken by oars, heaves placidly and soon sinks into an oily somnolence.' That will be useful.

To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.

My head is a hive of words that won't settle.