“All I ever wanted to do was act.”

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Source: Rivers of London (2011; American edition title: Midnight Riot), Chapter 13, “London Bridge” (p. 280)
Context: “Except he’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” said Mr. Punch. “Isn’t the universe wonderful.”

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

Comment on his 'Early Sunday Morning' (1930) https://www.wikiart.org/en/Search/Early%20Sunday%20Morning
1941 - 1967

New in Town (2012)

New York Times (July 2, 2004)

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

(full quote in context) Asked why he had not done more debates, Thompson replied "Standing up here 10 in a row, you know, like a bunch of seals waiting for somebody to throw you the next fish, is not necessarily the best way to impart your information to the American people. I'm not above acting like a seal every once in a while and waiting for the next fish, I just don't want to do it all the time."
[Ryan Sager, The New York Sun, http://www.nysun.com/article/62678?page_no=3, Mr. Sunshine State, September 14, 2007, 2007-09-21]

page 80
Source: A Million Little Pieces (2003)