Freud was just a novelist.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

Dream big and never give up on those dreams. Who knows where they'll take you?

A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.

I think about women and their thoughts and ideas, and I suppose when I'm painting them I'm getting to be them, in a sense. That is why I plainly paint women.

It's so weird for me to be watching The Good Wife while I'm still shooting The Good Wife.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

I never use the concept, multipolar. I use multilateral. Because we have only one global power: whether you like it or not, this is the United States.

The anchor of all my dreams is the collective wisdom of mankind as a whole.

We are willing to follow leaders only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

My dad is a big extrovert - he's a doctor - but he always loved [William] Shakespeare and he took us to tons of theater.