"It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."

"Off-camera lives are unverifiable."

"I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory."

"The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement."

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever."

"Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death."

"Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world."

"People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life."

"Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing"

"Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live."

"It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point."

"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."

"This is the end. For me the beginning of life."

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making yo"

"Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life."

"Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability."

"I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten."

"The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die."

"This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one."

"All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it."

"The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."