The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.

My mind is an instrument of peaceI am the peaceMy heart sing the song of peaceMy mind dances with peaceI laugh with peaceMy soul is longing for peaceMy spirit is the source of peace.

Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.

It's foolish to go through life bemoaning the fact that you can't have this or that. Twaddle! You can omit certain foods and still enjoy eating.

It's a little bit hard to have personal things subject to public scrutiny, and it's a pressure that other people aren't under, but then they're under a lot of pressures that we're not under.

Even I haven't downed enough L.A. Kool-Aid to believe that somehow Hollywood movies are an overt instrument of morality.

We need faith, not because there are beings who will punish us or reward us, but because gods are a wonderful way of describing things that are happening to us.

If one of my heroes comes to me and says, 'Do you want to work on something?' I just say, 'Yes.' I don't ask for details; I don't expect to get paid anything. I just love working with my heroes.

Being spontaneous, it's what saved me.