He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

Live free or die.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.

Without money nothing gets done.

I believe that each of us-no matter what our age or background or walk of life-each of us has something to contribute to the life of this nation.

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.

It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow than to spend tonight like there's no money.

He who controls the fools gold, controls the fools.

If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.