Generally speaking, we would make a good bargain by renouncing all the good that people say of us, upon condition they would say no ill.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Respect yourself and others will respect you.

I don’t fear you. It’s my feelings for you that I fear.

Perhaps you should speak more softly to me, then. Monsters are dangerous beasts, and just now kings seem to be dying like flies.

Stop thinking of failing.

Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.

The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.

Everyone knows [George W. Bush] has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as he always has been: barely adequate.

I'm not going to be happy until every child in every school is physically active.

An image has stuck for most of my career and it isn't flattering.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.