It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

It is not for me to suspect but to detect.

Changing imagination into fiction is what I love to do.

Everyone kept asking me to stay, so I did.

You're exactly as big as I let you be.

People's hearts are like wild animals. They attach their selves to those that love and train them.

The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.

There is nothing as easy as being inspired.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Noble character is best appreciated in those ages in which it can most readily develop.

As an actor and a director, I always let my actors go... assuming they have good ideas.