The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

He made her think of ruins, of mysterious places in shadow and darkness, of storms and torrents of rain.

Nothing comes easy in life even heart has to beat 72 times in a minute to keep you alive.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.

The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

For the land, the sea is beautiful; for the sea, the land is beautiful!

I hope I make films where you walk away . . . with work to do, arguments to have, things to worry about, things to care about. In that sense, I would regard what I do as political.

People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously.

Investment performance doesn't determine real-life returns; investor behavior does.