It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Without the dark side you would never see the light side of the stars

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

Turn off the radio, TV, DVD, iPod, computer and cell phone. Then, listen.

Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.

I've always enjoyed the teen angst thing. I had a lot of teen angst as I was growing up, so I think I have a lot to say about it through characters before I have to move on.

I think this society suffers so much from too much freedom, too many rights that allow people to be irresponsible.

The quality of food is in inverse proportion to a dining room's altitude, especially atop bank and hotel buildings (airplanes are an extreme example).

As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.

It's quite clear if you look at the actors in film right now, some of them came from theater but they didn't come from musical theater. There's still a bit of a stigma attached to it I would say.

I'd like to direct more operas.