“What I do on stage has utterly no purpose.”
Peter Gzowski's 90 Minutes Live interview (1977)
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Iggy Pop 19
American rock singer-songwriter, musician, and actor 1947Related quotes

Video farewell (2002)
Context: I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response. For an actor that is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can't part with you, which is why I won't exclude you from this stage in my life.
For now, I'm not changing anything. I will insist on work when I can; the doctors will insist on rest when I must. If you see a little less spring in my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you will know why. And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway.

Comment in early 1933 about Benito Mussolini to U.S. Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long, as quoted in Three New Deals : Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (2006) by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, p. 31
1930s

“What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.”
Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

Source: Gervaso, Roberto. La mosca al naso, Rizzoli Editore (1980)

As quoted in Dame Edith Evans, ch. 12, by Bryan Forbes (1977)
“The purpose of life is not to do what we want but what needs to be done.”
Variant: The purpose of life is not to do what we want but what needs to be done. This is what fate demands of us.
Source: Brisingr

(Attributed to him by his daughter, Adi Koila Nailatikau in a Senate speech http://www.parliament.gov.fj/hansard/viewhansard.aspx?hansardID=266&viewtype=full, 22 October 2004).
Attributed