Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Smiles are the language of love.

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

No one but a fool is always right.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

I'd rather be an unhappy principled man than a happy person with a lax conscience.

Excess of everything is worst

Intention is the measure for rendering actions true, so that, where intention is sound, action is sound, and where it is corrupt, then action is corrupt

You cant be a casual observer of something humorous - you have to engage, you have to find it funny for the relationship between actor and audience to work.

Remember when you're young and you think your dad is Superman? And then you grow up and realized he's just a drunk who wears a cape.

Marriage is the basic building block of civilization. We are redefining it at our own peril.

I think everybody reacts to entertainment with a different kind of visceral way, probably mostly based on their own personal experiences.

You're sick. Sick and evil and weird.