“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

Everything is nothing, with a twist.

Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on? she asked me. The big show is inside my head, I said.

To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

The only proof he needed for existence of god was music.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Science is magic that works.

If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? ‘I love you, too’.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I sing the progress of a deathless soul.

That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

You stand on dead men’s legs. You’ve never had any of your own. You couldn’t walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.

You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.