The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.

Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.

Oh, quit it! You're the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.

People in pain can be very self-destructive. And sometimes they pull in the people who are close to them, often without realizing.

For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

The choice of opening, whether to aim for quiet or risky play, depends not only on the style of a player, but also on the disposition with which he sits down at the board.

Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening.

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

The nuclear arms race is like two people sitting in a pool of gasoline spending all their time making matches.

The first step is learning to monitor your thoughts; to think about what you are thinking about.

To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.

In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.