I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.

I was a fat-headed guy, full of pain.

If anything were FULLY explained, everything would be explained.

When we worship God as we ought that's when the nations listen.

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. To tell the truth, there's hardly a difference.

I loved college. I wish I was still taking classes instead of teaching them.

I recognize the amount of time that it takes as a director. I made the choice to stop taking roles outside of L.A. because I didn't want to miss any of my child's life.

I try to avoid people's eyes because I don't like to get that intimate with just anybody. i don't need the responsibility.

The prospect of the UK without a BBC funded by the licence fee is anywhere between improbable and impossible.

Calumny is a vice of curious constitution; trying to kill it keeps it alive; leave it to itself and it will die a natural death.