What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Mediocre men wait for opportunity to come to them. Strong able alert men go after opportunity.

Life is large. We cannot possibly grasp the whole of it in the few years that we have to live. What is vital? What is essential? What may we profitably let go?

Breath is the king of mind.

I cannot avoid condemning all those who, from self-conceit have the pretension to imitate great artists of the past. If their powers of emotion be weak, their powers of expression will be likewise.

[W]e all lie down in our bed of earth as sure to wake as ever we can be to shut our eyes.

There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure what.

My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.

As a matter of fact, I find the Western cinema very fantastic.

It's all a game, with new rules every season.

You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.