"I have a task that is greater than all the labors assigned to Hercules. It demands that I live in the richness of this moment because that is all I have or will ever know."

“Nothing indicates the soundness of a man's judgment so much as knowing how to choose between two disadvantages.”

“What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.”

“I was in good shape from Divergent. Damien Chazelle, the director of Whiplash told me, ‘Stop Working Out! Don’t go outside!’ He wanted me pale and doughy. This is the first movie where I shut myself off from the world. It was, by far, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“I suppose, the natural outgrowth about writing about two friends, it becomes about their friendship, and the complexities of it, and the way personality plays off each other, and what they each like to do, separately and together.”

“Simple ideas are easier to understand. Ideas that are easier to understand are repeated. Ideas that are repeated change the world.”

“Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion!”

“Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.”

Source : "Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition", ed. William Philips, 1985.

“Baking is how you start kids at cooking in the kitchen. It's fun whether it's baking bread or cookies. With baking, you have to be exact when it comes to ingredients.”