“Patriotism. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.”

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence.

Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Prescription: A physician’s guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

A wedding is a ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable.

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.

True, man does not know woman. But neither does woman.

Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.

Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.

To the eye of failure success is an accident.

REALISM, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seem by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Mausoleum, n: the final and funniest folly of the rich.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

People who do crime do it for reward. But you end up in jail – that’s no reward. Through crime, your ambitions are low.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

My goal is to drop 10 projects in 2013. All albums. I gotta do it. I know the 10 projects I want to drop.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

The idea of putting out an album is quite exciting because it’s sharing your creativity with people. There’s no ambition to be famous. I couldn’t care less about that.

From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.