Quotes on Life

Most people would say the meaning of life is to make the world a little more beautiful, or nicer, or more interesting. But how? These days, our main answer to that is: through work.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

I want to go everywhere, look at and listen to everything. You can go crazy with some of the wonderful stuff there is in life.

I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

I don't think that because I'm not married it's made my life any less. That old maid myth is garbage.

People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie - or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people's life better, then that's something that's really good.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.

What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask.

Civilization depends on, and civility often requires, the willingness to say, 'What you are doing is none of my business' and 'What I am doing is none of your business.'

I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.

Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

You just can't beat the person who never gives up.

The worst time was 1983. Love and life and everything went wrong. I reached absolute rock bottom. I saw the Minotaur at the bottom of the abyss. I learnt of the harshness of the world and its impartiality to human failure.

The energy or active exercise of the mind constitutes life.

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.

I'm fulfilled in what I do. I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes - the finer things of life - would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.