"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

"Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work's important, family's important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming."

"There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards."

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse."

"I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way."

"Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls...are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered."

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."

"The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life"

"Life is nothing without a little chaos to make it interesting."

"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."

"The Laughing Heartyour life is your lifedon’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.be on the watch.there are ways out.there is a light somewhere.it may not be much light butit beats the darkness.be on the watch.the gods will offer you chances.know them.take them.you can’t beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes.and the more often you learn to do it,the more light there will be.your life is your life.know it while you have it.you are marvelousthe gods wait to delightin you."

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it."

"Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart."

"If other people do not understand our behavior—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being "asocial" or "irrational" in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to "explain," which usually implies that the explanation be "understood," i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation."

"Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be."

"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."