Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!

The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

What an uncertain thing, marriage - what an elusive thing, happiness!

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

We often call a certainty a hope to bring it luck.

Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

He is invariably in a hurry. Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

At the beginning, you are 20 and you can just imagine... don't get me wrong, but having money. Then you realise that it's not only about you and what you are doing but that you have to give back.

'Blind Date' was my lifeline. It was 90 minutes when I could forget about everything, forget about the world.

Too many multi-vitamins are packaged as one size fits all, but you should be more specific about what you need. When I was competing as a dancer, I took zinc for healthy skin and immune system.

You should have seen Willie Wells play shortstop: as good as Ozzie Smith and a better hitter. How I wish people could have seen Ray Dandridge play third base, as good as Brooks Robinson and Craig Nettles and all of those. He was bowlegged; a train might go through there, but not a baseball.

I enjoyed working at McDonald's.

Defeat is simply a signal to press onward.

I find that when I play reality-based characters, it is only as fun for me if I have a lot of time to do research. If I don't it just isn't exciting but if I do, it can be fun because I can learn about that person and the world that they live in and I can become somebody else.

Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.

I was a writer for hire. I wrote to pay the bills.

When I'm doing sports, I always think of how it's related to singing, and when I watch tennis, I learn a lot for my singing: how the players are focused, how they use their technique, and, in the case of Roger Federer, how effortless it is and how beautiful it is to watch - like bel canto, in a way. That's how singing should be.

I have to be in a relationship where I can say what I feel even if it's wrong - so we can work through it.

Stay true in the dark, and humble in the spotlight.

As a child, I was spoilt by my parents as an only son. They indulged my every whim, and I grew up in luxury.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

Well, you always discover a lot in the editing room. Particularly the action, because you have to over-shoot a lot and shoot an enormous amount of material because many of the sequences have to be discovered in the editing and manipulation of it.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.

I started playing guitar kind of by accident.