“No work is so important you have to do it.”

“My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.”

“To avoid starvation is the only excuse for working.”

“If your work is stressful, it's not your work.”

“The spiritual life to me has always meant just one thing: feeling.”

“I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful. I want to be the one who feels it.”

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they ...”

“Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiti...”

“It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instanc...”

“Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.”

“Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,”

“What, more realistically, is this mutation, the new man? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogues dream; the free-thinker ...”

“Universe is nothing, but human thought.”

“Nothing is the whole story. The selfs curse and the writers.”

“There's a fine line, you know. Between having space and having nothing.”