Gratitude, in most men, is only a strong and secret hope of greater favors.

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.

Permit no one to define you by your mistakes or your past

When everything else crumbles to dust, all we have left are the memories. I thought of Ophelia, wandering the theater, mind half gone...Never shall I cut from memory my sweet love's beauty.

I read the bible every day and the one thing I have noticed is that those characters that are closest to God seem to be the ones who question and wonder and think more than others.

If you keep groaning, please do it to a rythmn I can dance to.

If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.

We see but the outside of a rich man's happiness; few consider him to be like the silkworm, that, when she seems to play, is at the very same time consuming herself.

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

She had the power to destroy. I had only seen the power to love. When you discovered both, who could figure out what to do with that?

Bigger films are more difficult because the number of people is so huge.

I'm proud to be an Oakie from Muskogee, a place where even squares can have a ball. We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse and white lightning's still the biggest thrill of all.