“Each sporadic burst of work, each minor success and disappointment, each moment of calm and relaxation.”

I’m good at reading people.

It is easy to smile at an insult and pretend it’s funny when the person insulting you is hosing you with money.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist.

He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul – his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it’s a kind of risky trade.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully.

It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself.

Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

Since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

In the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers….

I would just like to say thank you to each one of my fans for supporting me all these years and continuing to come to the concerts and buy my music. I owe them everything.

Each tomorrow will depend on the love you give today.

Each man has in him the potential to realize the truth through his own will and endeavour and to help others to realize it.

Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.

I couldn’t stand here, hanging on, when the very thing i held disappeared more with each passing day.

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand;

Socrates said, our only knowledge was “To know that nothing could be known;” a pleasant Science enough, which levels to an ass Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present.