the first rule of life is to have a good time

"Against high odds and at whatever cost in private anguish, he has wrested a good time from the world - no mean prize. He has also succeeded in passing the only test that matters: he has given back to the world more than he has taken out of it." - Brenden Gill writing in a review of a biography of Philip Johnson, but he might as well have been writing about himself, as he did here:

"In fact, not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible... Since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so."