Men may boast of their great actions; but they are more often the effects of chance than of design.

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.

We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

Nobody has any security in loving me.

My daddy's response [to fear of being poor] was to never talk about money or what might happen if it ran out.

Something funny always happens in every show in the UK and I genuinely love touring the UK because it's where I'm from. I just get a warm feeling when I'm home.

Marvelous oriental pace he's got, just like a Buddhist statue.

Some things are sent to test us. Clearly you must be good at problem solving if you are being set tough exams.

If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.

I love Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, tragedy is not just something that's bad. It's something that could be good and is bad.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.