“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

“I promise to make this quick as my wife just informed me several minutes ago that she’s been in labor for the last five hours, and I really don’t want her to give birth to our first child down there in the front row.”... “Tell him to hang on, honey, I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. ”

“I have two problems with hard labor: hard and labor. I prefer soft, and I’d prefer not giving birth.”

“Nature constantly begins the same things over again, years, days, hours, spaces too. And numbers run end to end, one after another. This makes something in a way infinite and eternal. It is not that any of this is really infinite and eternal, but these finite entities multiply infinitely. Thus only number, which multiplies them, seems to me to be infinite.”

“He suggested I play golf, but finally agreed to give me something that, he said, "would really work"; and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.”