It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.

I wondered how my heart could be both light with happiness and heavy with love at the same time.

If an animal has any rights at all, it's got the right not to be eaten.

Real assistance is to help people to help themselves. We can't do everything for everybody, but there is room for all who try to make it.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

I have a strong disrespect for authority and for rules. Including gravity. Gravity sucks.

We notice what we choose to notice.

They say best men are molded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad