“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.”

The important thing is to be in love with something.

We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.

Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you’ll be a writer!

A life’s work should be based on love.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

If you learn only methods, you’ll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

I wonder why it is that we find some days so much more oppressive than others, for no apparent reason. Is it growing pains – or spiritual trial? Once they’re over, the world looks quite a different place again.

Never meant to crush your world and I never thought I would see the day we grew apart.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

In the early days, we just wore black onstage. Very bold, my dear. Then we introduced white, for variety, and it simply grew and grew.

Fascism did not die with Mussolini, he warned. Hitler is finished, but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains.

It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.

A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.