“Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.”

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material …

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge.

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.

For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again.

All know the way, but few actually walk it.

I didn’t tell my kids, ‘You have to play viola, and you have to play piano.’ They chose these things on their own, and I don’t think we have to give kids every choice, but we do have to give them some choice because that autonomy is crucial for fostering passion.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn’t. It’s a convention.

You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.

If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.