“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.”

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly?

The essential element of love is a belief in its own eternity.

Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.

When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.

From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.

In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.

He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

The worth of the state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

We mortals are composed of two great schools Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.

It may be observed of good writing, as of good blood, that it is much easier to say what it is composed of than to compose it.

Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.

Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty,

And a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body. A person might even be described as a self-contained multiverse.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.