Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep.
One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words.
What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.
I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.
The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.
All things lie dark in possibility.
The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?
In the time of your life, live---so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for andy life your life touches.
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
Be, beget, begone.
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.
There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It's no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven't we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?
I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good.
People are people. Don't be afraid of them.
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.
I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.
Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.
Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.
The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
You abandon most readily those works that have no destination other than your own wishes; there is no editor or producer standing there waiting for them... I've told every young writer I know to do the job all the way through even if they think it's no good. Then they'll have the precedent of having finished work.
Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior.
A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.
No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.
Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.
Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him.
All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for.
The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
Each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized.
It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?
In the time of your life, live - so that in this wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
