It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

deep inside the eyes of a true lover lies the heart of a true lover.

Most politicians would love to lead politically blind people.

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.

It still makes me giggle that I'm paid to act.

One doesn't become a soldier in a week - it takes training, study and discipline. There is no question that the finest Army in the world is found in the United States.

I kind of wanted someone to rearrange the stars so they spelled out his words. I needed them big and bright, and somewhere I could see then when things felt dark. I love you. And I'm so, so proud.

You wouldn't know how to perform a sketch that you don't find funny. You just couldn't do it.

If you're going to do something, do it with gusto. Don't do anything half-heartedly. That dishonors the doing and the doer. So go for it. Hold nothing back. In life. Or love. Or anything at all!

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.