We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

We don't act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.

Each step I take toward him is one more step closer to home.

Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

A gentleman is never in a hurry.

Failure either breaks people or it makes them succeed.

I don't tolerate liars. When somebody lies to me, that's really, like, just unbearable.

The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

On Hollywood turning its back on him: I wasn't in the club. You see, I'm not going to be a stroker. I never have been all my life.

I know the exact date that I began writing Twilight, because it was also the first day of swim lessons for my kids. So I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003.