I can't please everybody and I don't try to. If I can please myself that's enough. For the rest, I just hope for the best.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

Some people will of course accuse me of misanthropy and cynicism. I can't celebrate humanity but I'm not out to indict it either. I just want to expose certain truths.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

The ability to take pleasure in one's life is a skill and is a kind of intelligence.

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.

So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.

Usually the audience has no idea that the censored version of whatever movie they're watching isn't the original.

Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good.

Part of it has to do with this business of being approached in public. I have a distinctive look - it's partly the glasses I wear - and people seem to remember me once they've seen me.

And that's just what I'm saying. I would never want to be like certain people, who change the way they dress, go out in disguise, wear a big floppy hat and dark shades. I would hate that.

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting.

Like hatred, jealousy is forbidden by the laws of life because it is essentially destructive.

I have a lot of boyfriends, I want you to write that. Every country I visit, I have a different boyfriend. And I kiss them all.

Christ wants us to have a child's heart but a grown-up's head.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

There are no instant solutions.

Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere.

Surgery has trained me better than anything else to connect with people.

The best laid plans take 40 years to complete.