If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.
I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?
Time is the longest distance between two places.
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.
I have always been pushed by the negative.... The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes, you'll know you're dead.
Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
In memory, everything seems to happen to music.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.
Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it.... Success is shy-it won't come out while you're watching.
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.
When I stop [working], the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm working.
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.
You can be young without money, but you can't be old without it.
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.
