Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!

The past is just something that's over.

Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.