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.

My dad was not happy about my not becoming an architect like him.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word 'Dickensian' could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.

In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neighbouring red cells.

Britain has enormous amount of talent, as we've seen from the BAFTAs. It's all here, and it has to be allowed to flourish.

I thought it might be fun to set my books in Nevada, which is in the West and still pretty Wild. You can still gamble, carry a loaded pistol, and go into a silver-mine, and they still have saloons with swinging doors, boardwalks, and horses.

There are people, radio talk show hosts, those kind of people, it's their job to only have one opinion, they can't tell you about their feelings. They have to go with what pays their bills.

We worked over at that place The Plantation Inn with The Del Rios. It was really wild over there.

Since I finished on 'The Mentalist,' I didn't need to be so near to the studio, so we decided to move a bit further out where you can get more house for your money, too. It definitely feels more like home.

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

Space is something that you have to define. Otherwise, it is like anxiety, which is too vague. A fear is something specific. I like claustrophobic spaces, because at least then you know your limits.

I'm definitely interested in doing movies. I've always focused more on acting than singing because that's where my true passion lies.

I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I'd think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating.

Anyone who would let Gary Cooper and the entire cast go charging on horseback without first finding out what kind of footing the horses had is nuts and cannot possibly direct a motion picture.

There's clearly something to be said for success and following through on your commitments.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

You begin by letting thoughts flow and watching them. The very observation slows down the mind till it stops altogether. Once the mind is quiet, keep it.

There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic - like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it's there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.

The anti-nuke movement has important and far-reaching implications for grassroots organizing. It can unite kids and musicians, everybody, whether they're leftist or rightist, or radical, or Republican, because energy is energy. But in fact, it is a real political struggle - it shows people that it's big business against the people.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.

With pride, there are many curses. With humility, there come many blessings.

Medication can help us live a happier life.

Perish the infamous doctrine that man can have property in man. Let us resent with indignation every effort to put a chain upon our minds.