All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

Humility is a virtue, and it is a virtue innate in guests.

It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Nobody ever died of laughter.

You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.

People are either born hosts or born guests.

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

You will find my last words in the blue folder.

The delicate balance between modesty and conceit is popularity.

One might well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.

People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

To mankind in general Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

Anything that is worth doing has been done frequently. Things hitherto undone should be given, I suspect, a wide berth.

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans.

It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

All fantasy should have a solid base in reality.

Of all the objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful.

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

Most women are not as young as they are painted.

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle golden balls.

The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Have you ever noticed there is never any third act to a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there.

My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

We in this Congress have a choice. The American people have a right to exercise a choice on this issue, as to whether our men and women will continue to fight and die in a war based on deception and fantasy, or to start bringing the troops home.

One fantasy is that I just do a Don Roos movie every year if that's possible. If he'd have me.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I think sex is very interesting for most people, but I'm interested in sex as a way of communication, I'm not that interested in the fantasy version of a sex scene.

There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you're involved in, whether it's a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agenst or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.

Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

I think I'll give it up, the fantasy is over, I wanted to play Spiderman, Peter Parker.