I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.

I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?

I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.

I like L.A., but I think what's changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.

I love films. If I'd known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.

I'm ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.

If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.

It's great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.

Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.

Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.

There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.

There was a moment in the early '80s when I wanted to work on films and wanted to live in L.A.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

I think theres something degrading about having a husband for a rival. Its humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

Simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.

I don't like guys who will lie down and take it. I want someone who'll fight back. I like people who can argue well.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

The lie is a condition of life.

When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.

No lie ever reaches old age.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

It is all right for the lion and the lamb to lie down together if they are both asleep, but if one of them begins to get active, it is dangerous.

I can't believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can't believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

As of today, we do not need expert reports by the authoritative analytical institutions to realise that the reasons for such a situation in our community lie in global inequality, poverty and illiteracy.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

Even a secret agent can't lie to a Jewish mother.

A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.

I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.

Look, all administrations, all governments lie, all officials lie and nothing they say is to be believed. That's a pretty good rule.

Look, if America - if being an American means anything, it means not having to lie under oath, not even for the president.

Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.