The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

Uselessness, she thought, was the permanent condition of parenthood.

The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point

People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

You always have to sign contracts for several years, if they want to pick you up. It's kind of a strange scenario. They have the option or not.

Desires are only the lack of something: and those who have the greatest desires are in a worse condition than those who have none, or very slight ones.

A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.

If the people wanted my head I would bow without demur. If I had lost the confidence or respect of the people I would not want to live. The tragedy of the drama is that the very opposite is true.