You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.