And who are the greater criminals-those who sell the instruments of death, or those who buy them and use them?

We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting.

The happiest miser on earth is the man who saves up every friend he can make.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

The trouble with me is, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.

The only people who grow old were born old to begin with.

That's the whole story of my life: frustration. It's a chronic disease, and it's incurable.

Tenterhooks are the upholstery of the anxious seat.

Poor, dear God. Playing Idiot's Delight. The game that never means anything, and never ends.

Individual liberty may be unable to solve every social problem, but collective violence is unable to solve any social problem.

I have associated myself with failed scientists in order to associate myself with failed irony. ("Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka")

Expecting anything, living frugally in surprise.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

You play a couple of shows, and these label guys come - and they leave halfway through a show. Then the phone calls just stop. And your heart is broken.

The image is an image.

I must not say what I truly think, or you will tell me I flatter you-but I can only speak what I feel-and very often I cannot even do that when the feeling is very deep.

I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?

. . . [T]hose persons who console you today may humiliate you tomorrow.