What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.

I've got everything I need: a nice piece of land with hawks and owls and incredible sunsets, and the good will of my neighbors.

I've been dealing with politicians all my life. They are all talk, no action.

It's surprising how much wisdom every man possesses -- if not for his own affairs, then for the affairs of others.

I think Queen songs are pure escapism, like going to see a good film.

With Jerry Bruckheimer, you know you'll get your money's worth. You're getting huge action sequences, it's going to be funny, and you know it's going to look great.

When you are old, at evening candlelit, Beside the fire bending to your wool, Read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writ This praise for me when I was beautiful.

Experience shows us Wealth unchaperoned by Virtue is never an innocuous neighbor.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own Discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action.