They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

No two persons ever read the same book.

If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income.

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

In times of disorder and stress, the fanatics play a prominent role; in times of peace, the critics. Both are shot after the revolution.

I have learned to read the papers calmly and not to hate the fools I read about.

The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes.

Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.

I'd found out that if you pushed people away hard enough, they tended to go.

An apple tree is just like a person. In order to thrive, it needs companionship that's similar to it in some ways, but quite different than others.

Remember the unremembered

I'm so protected in my Nickelodeon bubble and 'What I Like About You.' It's all pretty much the same people I've worked with and it was pretty protected.

Make sure of two things. Be careful - microphones are always hot, and understand that in Washington, D.C., a gaffe is when you tell the truth. So, be careful.

The weather is entrancing, but in my heart there is no sun.

Pretending that we live doesn't make us alive.

Once I started selling scripts for a great deal of money - action scripts, no less, which people tend to pooh-pooh anyway - then I started to get some backlash. Which I didn't mind.

One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill. So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying.

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?