“There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.”

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material …

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

When you are young you take the kindness people show you as your right.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

We must be very humble. We must see the beauty of quietness. We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their ignorance is better than all our knowledge.

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.

For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

I think one of the big things about comedy is the ability for the audience to identify.

I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

Who you truly are is a place of no particular thing, but all things at once.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, ‘vulgar and unsafe’ — that was the worst thing.

Being a personality is not the same thing as having a personality.

Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.

What I don’t do – and this is the only thing I do differently in writing for kids – is that I don’t revel in the gory details.