“Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.”

“Wasn't he the one who said you shouldn't trust anybody who calls himself an ordinar man? - Naoko”

“That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more.”

“I never trust people with no appetite. It's like they're always holding something back on you.”

“[...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years."That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

“I'm in no position to hand down any advice," he said, "but there's a rule I follow when I don't know what to do.""A rule?""If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it's hard going at the time.”

“I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.”