“You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.”

“you can't escape the world, and you're not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. you're not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. it's all out of your hands.”

“What's the point of living if you're going to hate the world? Guard your heart if you have to, but don't shut it away.”

“Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.”

“People get annoyed with you if you treat them like they're automatons that lack free will. It's something that people find very constraining. There's something slave-like about that even. The demand that you don't have actual autonomy and, even worse, that you're not responsible for your choices – it's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their decisions. To do that to someone, from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity. You are mentally ill, or you don't have the intellectual capacity, or you were under some substance, or you had a brain injury, and that's why you're not responsible for your actions. Part of the respect that you give other human beings is that you acknowledge that they are responsible for their actions. Part of that, too, is that if you do something good, you're also responsible for that. It's got to be more annoying than anything else to strive virtuously, to produce something of extreme value, and then to be treated as if it is a mere deterministic outcome, and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that. It can be extraordinarily punishing.”

“When you're ready to make the change and you don't feel that you have the strength, know that you are connected with the same strength that moves the world; you just have to stop turning your back on it and connect with it.”

“You're doing OK. You're always doing OK — however bad you think you are doing — this is another page of the book. But remember the responsibility you can have, or the power you can have, to make the sun shine a little brighter for the person next to you. Even if you never see them again — it will mean the world to them, what you can do.”

“Sometimes the things you're convinced you don't want turn out to be the thing you need the most in this world.”

“[John] von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!”

“That's the trouble with having the whole world love you. One day, you wake up and it's flirting with your best friend instead. And you don't know what to do. You're thrown.”