I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

When I left Dortmund, I said it’s not important what people think when you come in but what they think when you leave.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down .

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

When you’re 25 or 30, you know, you can’t wear lime-green eye shadow anymore.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

A child thinks 20 shillings and 20 years can scarce ever be spent.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

How young can you die of old age?

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.

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

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you’re wonderful, then you start believing you’re fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

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.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

I’ve got a crush on my backing singer.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

The worst men often give the best advice.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

I don’t pretend to understand the Universe – it’s a great deal bigger than I am.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

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

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.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you’re heartbroken, but tomorrow you’ll be in love again.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

There are definitely elements of experience and stuff that someone who’s my age wouldn’t have. But there are also things that I can do that other people wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I’m an idealist without illusions.