The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded

A text of Tibetan Buddhism describes the time of death as a unique opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and a period that determines our next incarnation.

Stanislav Grof

I used to have a theory actually that, if you've had a good childhood, a good marriage and a little bit of money in the bank, you're going to make a lousy comedian.

David Steinberg

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.

Philip K. Dick, Exegesis Philip

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

Thornton Wilder

I would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome.

Julius Caesar

Love is blind friendship closes its eyes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In mainstream romantic comedies, I'm usually tearing my hair out. It's just a devastatingly difficult genre for me.

Carter Burwell

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

John Cheever

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.

Blaise Pascal

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Mark Twain

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach