“in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.”

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.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.

I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.

The idea of only someone else loving you is absurd. You need to learn to love yourself too.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.