If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own.

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt — and that is what you have been doing all your life.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment's torture.