Life is pain. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something.

—William Goldman

life pain selling salesmanship

About William Goldman

Portrait of William Goldman

William Goldman (August 12, 1931 – November 16, 2018) was an American novelist, screenwriter and playwright who wrote 16 novels and numerous screenplays in a career spanning seven decades. He received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Best Screenplay from the BAFTAs and Golden Globes for his first...

More quotations from William Goldman

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

—William Goldman

reading books irony

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

—William Goldman

life death fairness

Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.

—William Goldman

More quotations tagged with “pain”

The pain is just a subtle reminder of how alive you made me feel.

—Cassia Leo in Black Box

feeling pain aliveness reminders

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

—Henry Miller

music pain seriousness

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

—Thomas Cahill

war history pain grace catastrophe outrage

Marriage is a perilous and fearful effort, it seems to me. . . . It creates pain that it is the only cure for. It is the only comfort for its hardships. . . . Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see any night, is unimaginably large, and mostly empty, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than we needed to be apart.

—Wendell Berry

fear perspective pain marriage comfort

A broken leg can be remembered and located: "It hurt right below my knee, it throbbed, I felt sick at my stomach." But mental pain is remembered the way dreams are remembered — in fragments, unbidden realizations, like looking into a well and seeing the dim reflection of your face in that instant before the water shatters.

—Tracy Thompson

memory pain psychology