The climbing and soloing aren't worth dying for, but they are worth risking dying for.

At its best, climbing becomes a life focus around which everything else must orbit and at its least is an excellent diversion from the real world.

We cannot lower the mountain, therefore we must elevate ourselves.

You know your life is over when you own a lawnmower.

We'll climb with you and steal your women.

There were never going to be any happy ending for me. I know that now. But that is all right. That is all right.

Lips that taste of tears they say are the best for kissing.

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.

There's nothing quite like a real . . . train conductor to add color to a quotidian commute

The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.

I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac.

Conviction is the conscience of intellect.

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

Music's the best thing we do as humans, isn't it? Music, I mean you flail your limbs, make you move in a way you don't understand. Or it can make you weep like a sailor's wife staring at a storm.

God's existence cannot be deduced by reason alone.