The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.
Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
We are never content with our lot.
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life.
A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.
Happiness based on reasons is actually another form of misery.
Everyone wants to get out of living where they're living now, because life is a pretty tough proposition and not much fun. But when you think back to earlier times, you only extrapolate the nice things.
What an insignificant life is this which I am now leading!
Not being happy really is my fear.
Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to any general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become everything to all people end up by not being anything to anyone.
Fame doesn't make you happy.
Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday. That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have
By the time we've made it, we've had it.
It is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.
If I stay in one mindset or place for too long, I get crazy.
I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.
When I'm not creating something, I get bored; I despair.
Whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this, but it means that these women, they were not sharing my solitude.
The real question is why are millions of people so unhappy, so bored, so unfulfilled, that they are willing to drink, snort, inject or inhale any substance that might blot out reality and give them a bit of temporary relief.
The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
It is perfectly possible to get what you think you want and be miserable. It's possible too, to never get it but deeply enjoy the process of trying. In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.
When my mother left me waiting for her, [she] established in me the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain.
