I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Pride be damned, we do what must be done to survive.

We all know the true nature of the human soul, because we have all looked into the eyes of children, and saw ourselves looking back.

He who is afraid of suffering, is already suffering fear. Out of fear, true creativity is blocked.

The probability that the bowman's arrow hits the deer does not lie in the arrow or the deer. It lies in the bowman's mind.

I want you forever, Kate. I want to grow old and have you here in my arms. I want children. I've wanted you for so long. I don't think that's about to change.

I think we're [me and my son] different. He plans, organizes and intellectualizes more than I do. It wasn't until I worked with Federico Fellini that I understood what my problem was.

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor.

I have only one moral precept; never smoke more than five cigars at a time.

I've been on the phone, I think, 20 out of 24 hours the last three days.

Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope means recognizing fear.