A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.

It's the business I'm in, I can't say that signing things is the favourite part of my career but you know that it has to be done and that there is no pain involved.

I believe - what did Faulkner say? "The past is not even past."

I think it's a big chance to take to make a movie that's about as something as pure and honest and something people can relate to everyday.

I want to be harder to reach, not easier.

I want to be a compassionate soul, finding worth and beauty in the worlds around me and within me, attempting to sing a transcendent tune with my temporal position in this life.

I have never known my husband to approve any act of mine which I myself valued.

I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not. I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

Lay on, McDuff, and be damned he who first cries, 'Hold, enough!