On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies-that's an abomination.

With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don't have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.

What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?

To gain something, be ready to give up something.

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

Give the world what it wants and it will give you what you want

George Lucas was casting about and had heard favourable things about my work in Clockwork Orange and asked me to come in, which of course I did even though no one knew what the film was about!

Happiness is reverence for all life.

Prudence does not save us, but shows us pictures of our destroyers.

We should be inspired by people... who show that human beings can be kind, brave, generous, beautiful, strong-even in the most difficult circumstances.

Outstanding long-term results are produced primarily by avoiding dumb decisions, rather than by making brilliant ones.