If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.

You do get certain publications in the States where, if things don’t go according to plan, they flip the story and it becomes very negative.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

The main rule to me is to honor God with your life. To life a life of integrity. Not be selfish. You know, help others. But that’s really the essence of the Christian faith.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

I like being a writer.

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

‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

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.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

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 I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

My life is mine to remember.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

I love Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove – there is so much life and vitality around Portobello and Ladbroke Grove. It has come up a lot since I started Virgin more than 40 years ago, but there is so much character.

I love stories about women.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

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

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

Some may never live, but the crazy never die.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.