Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things.

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.

It's a rare man who can guard against beauty.

We are flawed creatures with explosive feelings that subconsciously aspire to be non-violent sociopaths.

I wish I had the gift of religious faith. Sometimes I long to believe in a structured universe designed purposefully for mankind.

There is nothing that robs a righteous cause of its strength more than a millionaire's money.

An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be.

Country music turns the stuff we say every day into a soundtrack...taking an ordinary working man like me into that rough, happy country of longnecks and short tales.

I'm only lookin' for a fantasy, an interlude from reality.

I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures.

I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition.