We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives.

Examining love is like examining a stocking: if you hold it up to the light and stretch it to search for snags, any snags there are may well run and ruin the stocking. In fact, if I may fashion Coudert's law from Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, it is this: Love is not only changed by observation; it is changed for the worse.

If life is envisioned as a continuously running motion picture, the keeping of a notebook stops the action and allows a meaningful scene to be explored frame by frame.

If you defy the system long enough you'll be rewarded. At first life takes revenge and reduces you to a sniveling mess. But keep sniveling, have the madness, the audacity, to do what interests you, forget about your pension, and eventually life will say all right, we'll let you do it.

While it is necessary to eat and therefore it is pleasantest to eat food that looks handsome and tastes good, on the other hand there are things I would far rather do than spend time in a kitchen.

It is one of those quirks of human nature that you love the person whom you treat well, not necessarily the person who treats you well.

The people trying to change others can conveniently be termed the angry, while the people trying to change themselves might be called the guilty, although it would be just as descriptive to speak of the controlling and the dependent, or the paranoid and the repressive, or, inelegantly, the screamers and the criers. In some circles, attaching labels to people rates only a little higher than chicken stealing, because ... a label immediately ends attempts to understand the individual.