“Rather than programming children as if they were computers, parents should be something like art instructors. Because life is like a clump-of-clay, you can’t make it into an expression of beauty, unless you take it into your hands. While sprinkling their lives with painful and playful diversions, people wait their lives miserably into old age, for the skills to live-life, to–come as did life- itself.”

“Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.”

“Part of this book is an homage to the way my friends and I live: lives without children, without marriage, lives you rarely see depicted in popular art, unless as a punch line or a tragedy, lives not considered by many to be full, legitimate adulthood. And yet when I was growing up, my parents always had a diversity of friends, some of whom lived different kinds of lives themselves…And they had many friends who had chosen this other path of adulthood, who weren’t married, who didn’t have children, whose lives didn’t resemble their own. So this sort of life never seemed like anything less-than to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it’s a lesser existence, a purgatory of true adulthood.”

“The idea of taking up art as a calling, a profession, is a mirage. Art enriches life. It makes life worth living. But to make a living at it—that idea is incompatible with making art.”

“Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.”

“Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”

“This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.”

“Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.”

“The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.”

“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.”