Children enjoy inflicting pain until unhappiness teaches them tenderness.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

When our party had only seven men, it already had two principles. First, it wanted to be a party with a true ideology. And second, it wanted to be the one and only power in Germany.

Are you suggesting that we reopen the Opera with a murder as an added attraction?

God would behold in you a simplicity which will contain so much the more of His wisdom as it contains less of your own.

Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century.

I think there is a lot of fat in the government.

Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

sometimes in comedy you can make the audience feel poignancy stronger than you can with tears or anguish.