Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.

A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.

Never be afraid to love, not even when there's a chance you're not being loved in return.

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.

Survival is not important. What matters is how you survive.