You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.

It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.

I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.

Time is of your own making; Its clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought Time too stops dead.

When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.

The G.O.P. is desperately seeking someone who can save the party from the fate of nominating Mitt Romney. But every time a non-Mitt throws his hat in the ring, the hat explodes.

In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.

Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion.

The enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible.

I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime.