Though confidence is very fine, and makes the future sunny; I want no confidence for mine, I'd rather have the money

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.

Believe and acknowledge that God is the source of your big dreams, but not you!

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Wealth is a dangerous inheritance, unless the inheritor is trained to active benevolence.

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

There is always something wrong with a song, you can't be perfect.

Happiness isn't something this island yields easily; the ground is too rocky and the sun too sparse for it to flourish.

I believe that modern science supports free will, in showing that the brain can act spontaneously, not only in response to external stimuli.

I sort of pride myself in my dissatisfaction with my work. I've always been concerned with buying the hype, and having that make your performances suffer.

I'm like old wine. They don't bring me out very often, but I'm well preserved.

Have you ever hung a piece of black velvet behind you and looked at yourself in the mirror? We are each of us quite alone, and that's what I try to paint.