During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.

When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

To be a woman is a great adventure; To drive men mad is a heroic thing.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

They don't ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

You never do a movie and not want it to work. You accept whatever it is. You have to, but nobody in their right mind would not want the movie to be getting talked about at the end of the year.

He recalls what that first German soldier said to his major: No God-not yours or mine-approves of what you're doing.

Paradise is full of idiots who believe it exists

All I have is an opinion - I don't deal in Truth.

I'm all about change, and I know things are going to move forward in life, and that's just how it goes.

Fear is for people who don’t get out very much.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

When you're busy blocking out difficult emotions and feelings, you're not going to feel the good stuff, either.

I no longer run barefoot.