Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

The witty woman is a tragic figure in American life. Wit destroys eroticism and eroticism destroys wit, so women must choose between taking lovers and taking no prisoners.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she. Real feminism is spinsterhood.

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning, it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

I'd rather rot on my own floor than be found by a bunch of bingo players in a nursing home.

American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.

To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

If we define a misanthrope as someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer, we have described a person with something to look forward to.

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.

Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.

There is more sexism in a year's worth of movies than actually exists in a woman's entire lifetime.

Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy. If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well

It takes only one child to raze a village.

We worship education but hate learning. We worship success but hate the successful. We worship fame but hate the famous.

While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.

The family is changing, not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

We are such materialists that all our metaphors are going to be material.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

Some say Hollywood movies that are made about boxing are just metaphors for other things, I think I've made one that's actually about boxing and not a metaphor.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions.

People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?