Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.

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.

...most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of the people around you.

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.

Experience is not a surety for profit but security.Carry an Honest Experience.

No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

When my first daughter was born, I had to figure out a new way of [making music] so that I wouldn't wake her up.

As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.

If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're pissing all over today.

Loving what you do is almost as important as doing what you love, especially if you need to make a living at it.

Lot of the scripts I've been in with other non-white actors haven't been great. Lot of non-white actors ain't all that great.