“Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.”

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

To know the world, one must construct it.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.

But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.

People who do crime do it for reward. But you end up in jail – that’s no reward. Through crime, your ambitions are low.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

My goal is to drop 10 projects in 2013. All albums. I gotta do it. I know the 10 projects I want to drop.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

The idea of putting out an album is quite exciting because it’s sharing your creativity with people. There’s no ambition to be famous. I couldn’t care less about that.

From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

The best job a man could have would be a chef. They’d understand the long hours I work and the drive and ambition it takes to succeed.