Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The tension between "yes" and "no," between "I can" and "I cannot," makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this We start our lives as if they were momentous stories with a beginning a middle and an appropriate end only to find that they are mostly middles.

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other the whole world loses some of its radiance.

The tension between "yes" and "no", between "I can" and "I cannot", makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

I saw all those great '70s films when I was 9, and no one in my Brooklyn neighborhood cared if a kid watched an R movie.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

Las Vegas, New Mexico has had a lot of great movies shot there.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them look like droopy-eyed armless children.

I have some tremendous, tremendously loving, generous friends all over the world.

Are there many Tims in America? I don't know if I can think of many American Tims.

Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply. those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.

Cancer is really a DNA disease... We have these certain genes that prevent our cells from growing out of control at the expense of the body. And it's a pretty good, robust system. But if a couple of these genes fail, then that's when cancer starts, and cells start growing out of control.

If a woman is comfortable with herself, I think that's what radiates. I think the moment you start questioning your body and looks is when you get into trouble.

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She's my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening to people when I was a bartender and when I was a waitress and probably when I was a babysitter as well. I suspect that's part of what drew me to psychotherapy rather than the other way around.

I can look at cancer as a disease that picks me out and 'why me,' or I can look at it through love and say, 'This is a wake-up call. This is my body telling me: 'Hey, you're out of balance here. It's time to get in line with yourself.'

I have a family. I'm married. I'm very, very happy.

I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.

You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?

I'm really fascinated by the self and how our selves shift and change over time and in relationship to different people.

I had no idea I was going to have a career in the theater. I did not plan it.

I love singing and performing. I'm always singing. Even if I'm at school or in the car, I'm always singing. My mom said ever since I could talk, I was singing.

I know not age, nor weariness nor defeat.

If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.

Almost all of us growing up have played baseball on some level. It has an inside track with people. It has a unifying effect.

It bothers me when people say, 'Oh, you're so down to earth - for an actor.' Even when they don't say 'for an actor,' I feel like that's the implication. Why are the standards so low for performers?