Luxury and excessive refinement are sure forerunners of the decadence of states, because when all individuals seek their own interests they neglect the public weal.

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.

You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?""The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?

My favorite favorites are people like Bunuel, Fellini and Charlie Chaplin.

I was supposed to be a romancer, either wooing the leading lady or competing with the leading man for her.

I tried to dance in my earlier films, but it was more like struggling to stay afloat once you are thrown into the water.

I just loved comedy as a kid and I think at some point, it just occurred to me that you could try it, and I did.

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.

I thought a dignified thing to do would be to live in the country by the time I'm 50 and write books

One's need for loneliness is not satisfied if one sits at a table alone. There must be empty chairs as well.

To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating.

Нou're always in constant dialogue with your interior self versus your exterior self: how you look, and how you're perceived, and then people's preconceived notions of you.