The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
Even the idiot may have a message for us.
The world is two thirds spaghetti and meatballs, one third syphilitic chancre.
There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of our time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.
Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we would all be Jesus Christ today.
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
Voyages are accomplished inwardly.
Paint what you like and die happy.
The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.
I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.
I haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor against. I’m a neutral.
But it’s just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world – it’s the American way of looking at things.
Plots and character don’t make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.