Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

One is not born a woman, but becomes one.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

Buying is a profound pleasure.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself – exactly oneself and no one else.

To lose confidence in one's body is to lose confidence in oneself.

When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world.

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed.

The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.

As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but they were dying of scurvy.

It's a technical, fairly difficult job that has no particular political connotations, so I doubt there are any big campaign contributors dying to be on the Fed. And remember, it doesn't pay very well, certainly by Republican standards.

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off.

Dying people in pre-industrial cultures typically died in the context of an extended family, clan, or tribe.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.