Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.

Living the gospel and standing in holy places is not always easy, but I testify that it is worth it.

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.

Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

When you make a movie, you're spending a month of your life with someone and, down the line, you have to spend more months with them. It is this mini-marriage that you have.

The pressure to conform to an authority figure or peer group can cause people to behave in shocking ways.

It doesn't take more skill to paint hundreds of strokes rather than one right stroke but it takes more patience.

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess.