John Quotes

When I did 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', I had the idea on Monday and the following Tuesday it was in budget at Paramount. I couldn't walk.

I'm a former hippie, so clothes are important to me - your clothes defined you in that period. I guess clothes still defines people. But, I change a lot. I'm in my Brooks Brothers period now.

It has been said that he who was the first to abuse his fellow-man instead of knocking out his brains without a word, laid thereby the basis of civilisation.

The violence had broken out in both sides, but our philosophy as a party was very, very clear.

I don't like no confusion.

I'm really the addition of other peoples' imagination, quite honestly. It's what they see me as, and I'm very happy to comply. I find things are more varied that way.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time, to say high Anglo-Catholic would be a real English understatement.

A very, very impressive director, Tomas Alfredson. It's only his second film [ 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'], but he's a real find.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

I am more lost in wonder than ever.

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.

Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!

I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.

It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax.

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

Summer softens lines that winter cruelly shows.

The abyss you stare into and that stares back at you is your reflection in the mirror - we all have it - that shadow self - that dark heart.

And not out of fear or loneliness, but only to find myself again... for we have come too far my Life, to turn back now.

A sensual life is a ghostly existence where you live on the surface and your soul passes through everything, touching nothing.

That icy glass reduces your beauty - dims your fire - let me be your mirror...

When we perfect 3-D copiers and they reproduce tissue, we'll have a million Marilyns walking around with no souls.

Each heart is made of a different stone - no two feel alike nor break the same way.

I cannot help but think a curious event is this life of mine

I wish I had eight pairs of hands, and another body to shoot the specimens.

On the 17th of May, the Delos put out to sea. I was immediately affected with sea-sickness, which, however, lasted but a short time. I remained on deck constantly, forcing myself to exercise.

I feel fully decided that we should all go to Europe together and to work as if an established Partnership for Life consisting of Husband Wife and Children.

One trouble is that when Government gets into a business it tends to make it uneconomic for anyone else.

A glimmer of light is better than no illumination at all.

Happiness is an endowment and not an acquisition. It depends more upon temperament and disposition than environment.

Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.

When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise.

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this; that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

If any of you ... have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.

The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think.

The time has come for justice at the ballot box, and justice in the courts, and justice in the legislative halls, and justice in the governor's office.

If you are a friend of the Constitution as I am, I hope you will consider engaging me in the topics of my posts whether you agree or disagree with my position on a particular subject.

There can be no stewardship without stewards.

The jazz trombone is a magical experience particularly to hear and listen too.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

You are able to create an environment so that the creative process can take place and that you can get people to perform at their highest levels.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.

The challenge is to manage creative people so that the output is fruitful. The challenge is not to have an open environment and simply let them do whatever they want.