“It's… a transcendental act. Making life. I thought about that when I was carrying Miles. 'By this act, I bring one death into the world.' One birth, one death, and all the pain and acts of will between.”

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. or wonder who, after all, you are.”

“All the time I felt I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone, that this action could be done only if it was spontaneous, pure – and moral. Because more and more it crept through my mind with the chill spring night that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamentally aesthetic one; to do something that would end my life sensationally, significantly, consistently. It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one. A death to be remembered, not the true death of a true suicide, the death obliterate.”

“I consider that goodness of being and doing constitute the rock-bottom of one’s life. By goodness I mean the capacity to feel with others and to live and feel as others do, and be in a position to act so that no one is hurt by the act.”

“I can get caught in many things but there is one thing I will never get caught in, and that is acting - because I don't act. On screen I am like I am in real life.”

“If there were one word that could act as a standard of conduct for one's entire life, perhaps it would be 'thoughtfulness.”

“Solitude gives an I. I that gives solitude. It is in our thoughts, and the one the world gives, in our feelings. Because solitude grows accustomed to seeing, to contemplating; and the world, to acting for itself.”

“Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.”

“… the affectation of readiness for death is a stage rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource though the only one. Non dolet, Pæte! One is ashamed of it even in the acting.”

“There are the people in this world who act, and the people who scheme. The ones who act get things done, and the ones who scheme try to take credit for it. You must know that as well as I do.”