My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Stop trying to make everyone happy. You're not tequila.

There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

I now view life as a complex and unpredictable affair that cannot be mastered. It can be embraced. It can be negotiated more or less skillfully. But mastered? Not a chance.

I ask for a decreedooming my bitter enemies to laughteradvanced against them.

When I give speeches at college, I don't tell stories, I talk about what it is to live your dreams and take the path less traveled.

I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved.

Novelty is always welcome but talking pictures are just a fad.

You cannot think your way out of a box made of thought.

Make your vocation your vacation. That is the secret to success.

It seems to me a measure of the true perversity of the human race, that one of its very few reliably pleasurable activities should be the subject of so much hysteria and repression.