“Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.”

The worst part about being lied to is knowing you weren’t worth the truth.

To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.

I am myself and I am here.

Little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea.

Death is a continuation of my life without me.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

Life has no meaning a priori, It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.

If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast – or else there is nothing at all.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

I said to myself, ‘I want to die decently’.

In the end not every bleeding thing dies; at least, not like a paper plays in fire.

There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget.

Back in the old days, a man could just get sick and die. Now they have to wage a battle. So my Uncle Bert is waging a courageous battle, which I’ve seen, because I go and visit him. And this is the battle: he’s lying in the hospital bed, with a thing in his arm, watching Matlock on the TV.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

He was the first, the only love her life, and in a nature like hers such passions take deep root and die-hard.

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!