Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.

I'm 53. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Only Once In Your Life

I'm living in the moment. I just try to move each of the stories, scripts and projects that I work on forward. And when they're ready and the people are ready to make them, we'll do that.

Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

It's better to oversleep and miss the boat than get up early and sink.

You never date someone's ex-boyfriend. Period. That's not even the unspoken rule - that's the spoken rule.

In popular books and articles, information technology writer Carr has worried over the ways that algorithms like those employed by Google are reshaping the ways we think.

Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.

Fire is the best of servants, but what a master!