“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.

I like children. If they’re properly cooked.

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.

I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts – spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back – length of life.

I don’t want my kids saying, ‘My dad was a gangster, so I need to be a gangster. I would rather mine say, ‘My dad was a stunna, so I need to be a stunna.

I never met a kid I liked.

Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.

I ain’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug. I don’t want anybody to kind of look at me like that.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.