ROBERT M. PIRSIG

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.

Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night, and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.

I have money, fame, a happy wife, our daughter Nell.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

There's no such thing as morality.

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

I did not want to write one of those sequels that famous first-book authors get into where everybody says, 'Oh yeah.'

What I am is a heretic who's recanted and, thereby, in everyone's eyes, saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

Quality is the Buddha.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.