Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

We all gonna die eventually from something or other, but don’t be a wimp. Put up a good fight.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just demand more of life than what is happening in the moment. Sometimes this is a great mistake, as it’s always a good deal different than you expect it.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

If you don’t live your life, then who will?

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Life is short, the art long.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

The chief condition on which, life, health and vigor depend on, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.

People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it’s so important to me. It’s hard to hear that people think I’m not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I’m nuts.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

Changes are not unusual – I mean, most movies, when they release them, they make changes. But somehow, when I make the slightest change, everybody thinks it’s the end of the world.

Everybody has their thing they like or don’t like to see. It’s all in your head. That’s why people take their own pictures, because it’s difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.