To a child, and to an adult, too, what you discover by yourself, or what you think you discover by yourself, is what stays.

Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.

So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

...it's not just learning that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.

You must never feel badly about making mistakes.

The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.

The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.

Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.

But I suppose there's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.

A good book written for children can be read by adults

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

Irreverence is a declaration of independence.

Perhaps I'm too saucy or provoking?

I've never wanted an Oscar, although they are reassuring to an actor who doesn't know how really great he is.

I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.

I'm a child of the woods. I have that sort of sensibility.

Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.

Seas are the fields of combat for the winds; but when they sweep along some flowery coast, their wings move mildly, and their rage is lost.

I feel affluent or not according to what part of town I am in.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.