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

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.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

Clearly, high energy prices will have a large negative effect on the California economy and could possibly drag the rest of the nation into a recession.

No, I didn't quite know to what extent the football might be, but it was quite a bonus for me to try to learn new skills and to keep fit at the same time.

I suppose the best advice I ever got, frankly the advice that changed my life, came from my uncle who told me to go to drama school and study acting instead of taking a job, because he said the job would always be there.

Self-doubt imprisons those that never overcome it.

I wasn't popular in the home office because I wasn't chicken. I'm just a risk taker. I have gut instincts.

High School. Societys bright idea to put all of their aggressive naive youth into one environment to torment and emotionally scar each other for life.

I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.

I mean, the sound of an amplified guitar in a room full of people was so hypnotic and addictive to me, that I could cross any kind of border to get on there.

I like to talk on the cell when I do interviews. That way, I double my chances of getting brain cancer: from the cell phone, and from the questions.

I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

The revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobilizing the masses and relying on them.

We must unify Taiwan; we cannot afford to have our society being divided in half.

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.