I can always live in my art, but never in my life.
— Ingmar Bergman, director
Life is like a play. It is not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters.
— Seneca
An eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice. And, per contra, the average eccentric - for there are many of us, of different waters and magnitudes - is utterly baffled and bored by the adjacent tourist who boasts of his business connections. In that sense, I often feel lost; but then, other people feel lost in my presence too. And I also know, as a good eccentric should, that the dreary old fellow who has been telling me all about the rise of mortgage interest rates may suddenly turn out to be the greatest living authority on springtails or tumblebugs.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas… he does not realize that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular writer is that the particular ideas of that writer have not yet become general.
— Vladimir Nabokov, from Strong Opinions
I’d like to tell someone I love them, Jeeves.” “A very human longing, sir.” “Hard facing life by myself, Jeeves.
— Jonathan Ames (thought I’d break the somberness by adding some funny quotes)
The desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world
— John le Carre
You have to live spherically—in many directions. To accept yourself for what you are without inhibitions, to be open.
— Federico Fellini
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
— Thoreau
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair
