Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

The truth is always multiplex.

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Ambition like a liquid ruby stains.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

Greatness is obedience to what Jesus said, to the commission to go to the ends of the earth. It means setting out to make some difference somewhere to someone, in the Name of Jesus Christ.

. . . for any worthwhile martial arts skill to be pragmatic, it has to be done live, otherwise it is of limited or no use in actual combat

You are always hoping that movie audiences are interested in characters and interested in story values rather than just mindless special effects. But you never know.

Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.

Mike Tyson has been accused of being a homosexual. What change do I have, you know? Everyone's in the same boat? Who could possibly care or believe anything after hearing that, really?

Just because you can't see them and you can't hear them, that doesn't mean they're not here.

If society gives up the right to impose the death penalty, then self-help will appear again and personal vendettas will be around the corner.

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

I've always been very interested in the visual aspect of what I do.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields; A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.