“Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.”

For time is the longest distance between two places.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The soul, in its power, is present in some way in the entire universe, because it apprehends substances which are not included in the body in which it lives, although they are related to it.

Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.

Only those will apprehend religion who can probe its depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method