The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that.

You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

Storytelling is the distinctly human implement designed to synthesize our purposeful interaction with reality.

We are pagans. We deify each other.

And I'm hoping that over the next 20, 50 years, whatever, the mystique of television and film and all that will diminish somewhat, and people will leave us alone to get on with our jobs.

Forms of government matter, in my opinion. It matters how -- the nature of the government in which people live.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

Beauty is the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

I'm trying to solidify a long-term career, because I have no other skills and no other abilities.

I dream of vague shapes that hint of my heart's desire.

I don't think any one person, whether artist or not, has been given permission by anyone to put the responsibility of the way things are on anyone else

Defend me, therefore, common sense, say From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up.