Prosperity's disciples build careful bastions against age and change.

If you have to make mistakes, make them good and big, don't be middling if you can help it.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

... lapses of memory are only attractive when you've encouraged them, not when they take you unawares.

Try not to have idols: they are interchangeable and lead to a wantonness that is easily mistaken for love.

Am I incapable of living with the one sole guarantee, that I'm still here? Am I afraid of living because I fear death?

My stage fright gets worse at every performance. During the overture I hope for a theater fire, typhoon, revolution in the Pentagon.

If one sits down and concentrates on imagining the worst possible surroundings for rehearsing a musical show, it's never as bad as the rehearsal rooms one actually lands in.

The so-called film star's lot is an infantile and precarious one.

But most of all, I'll remember how she loved me. I turn away, knowing that I might never get to see Julie Murphy again. But I will know her for the rest of my life.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

He would die in this room, buried alive by the weight of his life.

It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

We as [churches] may be lampstands, but all of the light is Christ Himself. We exist in order that He might shine through us.

There's a part of us that is addicted to suffering, that equates love with suffering.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

And who cares what anyone here thinks? Enjoy life. No one gets out alive.

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.