Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

I think a dad has to make his daughter feel that he's genuinely interested in what she's going through.

I've always been interested in the outsider.

For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.

Losing touch with spirit does nothing to the field of creativity, which is beyond harm; but it can do much to damage a person's chance in life.

Benchley and I had an office in the old Life magazine that was so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.

Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea.

Why should I say I will retire in three or four years? You retire the very moment you utter those words.

I see most of my movies at festivals.

A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.

Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.