Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‚No Reservations‘ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

My whole life has been one big improvisation.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

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.

Change alone is unchanging.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Life is better when people are working, happy, and spending money.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

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

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course, nobody bought any of them, but otherwise, I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s!

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

All that seems indispensible in stating the account between the dead and the living, is to see that the debts against the latter do not exceed the advances made by the former.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

A worthy woman personifies the truly noble and worthwhile attributes of life.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

Not bragging by any means, but I could have done a lot of other stuff as far as working in films go and working in television… I had chances to do that stuff, but I like baseball, I really do.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Music is something no one can control.

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

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

Real life? Well, I just hope mine isn’t investigated. They might find that I don’t really exist – that I’m just a hologram.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

I hate to mention age, but I come from an era when we weren’t consumed by technology and television.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

An unused life is an early death.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

The Congo was the most difficult shoot of my life but was also maybe the greatest adventure of my life.

I didn’t know the term ‚synesthesia‘ until I was working on ‚Cruel Summer.‘ Halfway into writing that, I really understood that, my entire life, I had been trying to describe this condition of mine: through painting, through this seven-screen Surround Vision film we shot in Qatar, through all these things.

Life is a matter of really tough choices.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.