When I was young, I don't know how, I spent all my time in the presence of married women telling me their troubles. And when I said 'Why did you marry?' they said, 'Oh I married to get away from home.' And when I said, 'And why don't you leave him?' they gave the saddest answer in the world: they said, 'Where would I go?' So they stayed with men they didn't like because they had nowhere to go.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

The absolute nothingness of death is a blessing. Something to look forward to.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

The message that 'love' will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture - like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.

It is true that in America I've become a national hero, but really I was a hopeless case, that was all.

I never say 'No' to anything.