What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.

I'll be damned if death wears my sadness for glad rags.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.