“He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.”

I haven’t been to sleep for over a year. That’s why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn’t sleep.

When we argue for our limitations, we get to keep them.

We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them…

I can’t bare you when you’re not amusing.

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

Other times, you’re doing some piece of work and suddenly you get feedback that tells you that you have touched something that is very alive in the cosmos.

Let this now be the time, to give thanks even to a small thing that keeps you alive.

I was totally alive when I wrote this because by coincidence someone just said your name.

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I’m home.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

And perhaps the greatest paradox of all is how we stand here, fully wounded yet never more alive.