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

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.

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.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively.

I absolutely don’t believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.

My advice to teens is to try and do something that scares you every day because it’s the only way you can test how far you can really go.

I’m not afraid of death. How can you be afraid of something that’s inevitable?

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Everybody needs someone to love. Everybody needs something to hope for, and, of course, everybody needs someone to believe in.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

All things must change to something new, to something strange.

The way I look at it is, if you don’t want somebody to know something, don’t say it. If you don’t want them to see you do something, don’t do it.

If you’re disciplined enough, you don’t get down when you’re behind, and you have a chance to create something positive.