When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.

Dignity was the first quality to be abandoned when the heart took over the running of human affairs.

The last thing you know about yourself is your effect.

I don't think they'll ever make a retro Bond.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone.

I have teken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquility in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.

I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.

Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.

I let people off the hook too easily.

What the superior man seeks is in himself what the small man seeks is in others.

Remember, the past need not become our future as well.

What was it about this man that one minute had me wanting to throw myself at him, climb him like a cat to rub up against and the next, wanting to scratch his eyes out while I was up there?

I am a planter - a cotton planter. I am a Southern man and a slaveholder - a kind and a merciful one, I trust - and none the worse for being a slaveholder.

But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

If things don't seem out of control, you're not going fast enough.

We're talking about the chemical lobotomy. We're talking about the chemical straightjacketing of our children.

To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.

Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.