Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them.

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.

In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.

I think it was hard at first for my dad to transition to being immobile.

The literati in their cellarsPerform semantic tarantellas.I wish I did it half as well as them.

Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner?

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

It can make you sad to look at pictures from your youth. So there's a trick to it. The trick is not to look at the later pictures.

I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.

We just did a few takes of a song and just picked the best one. It was real organic and genuine.

One of the main things when you get notes from a studio is they don't want anyone to be confused ever, everything has got to be so obvious at all times unless it's a twist ending.