Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

I drink to make other people interesting.

Don't be afraid that things are changing, because indeed they always are.

If you are on the right path, it will always be uphill.

It is better to think of all the beauties of life than to be bitter.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

You dramatically increase your value to others if you always maintain a calm and pleasant manner.

Everybody wants to be more wanted, until they are.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Until your dream dominates your mindset, you'll never wake up to your greatness.

I think I've done every disgusting thing you can in a film.