When we exaggerate our friends' tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue.

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.

One thing I've learned: we don't stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.

Once the spark of true love has been ignited, it cannot be quenched. It is there forever.

I believe we are our own gods, and our own devils. Good and evil doesn’t exist out there in the world, it exists in each and every one of us.

Then I did The Tao of Steve and that was at Sundance in 2000 where it did really well.

It takes 25 years to learn to draw, one hour to learn to paint.

The Justice of today is born of yesterday's pity.

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

My mantra is: Realize you're going to fail all the time, and accept it. That doesn't mean I'm not frightened of it.

Carl Jung put [Orfeo Angelucci] in his last book [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959]. He said Orfeo had made up a new bible.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.