As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
Looking over the Pacific, you feel invaded by peace.
Reality is overrated. Pick the delusion that works for you.
one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.
At the extremes of capitalism and communism, everyone waits in lines for food.
Plus, in college you don't yet have to face the hardest kind of work — discovering new problems to solve.
I am finding being alive fascinating, so I'll forgive you the act. But always hate the lies and trapping that followed.
Who needs transcendent meaning and purpose when we have capitalism?
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, “No, I went to films.”
It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
We create our own demons.
It's not the alcohol, or the drugs, or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career, or when you were a kid. It's you. Okay? It's you.
Die with memories, not dreams.
Play the hand you're dealt.
I guess I died of life, like we all will.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.
Be careful what you ridicule, as you may become it.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
— Commonly attributed to Winston Churchill (attribution disputed)
Work is the antidote to anxiety.
I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Whatever age you are today, your future self would love to be it... The moment in front of you right now is a good one. Make the most of it.
If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
What is writing? It's me, the author, taking the state inside my mind and, via the gift of language, grafting it onto yours... All with mere words: memes of meaning strung together according to grammar and good taste. Astonishing when you think about it.