That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

I don't set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.

I have no television - I hate it.

Ripley is married. And he's not lost. He has his feet on the ground.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

I hated cracking the whip, and these juries turn into political things.

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.

I don't want to know movie directors. I don't want to be close to them. I don't want to interfere with their work. I don't want them to interfere with mine.

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

I hope it will be set in California. In a way, I made a mistake, because a New Jersey policeman can't operate that way in New York. But in California, he can move between different counties.

If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.

I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week.

Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten.

I don't think Ripley is gay. He appreciates good looks in other men, that's true. But he's married in later books. I'm not saying he's very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.

A few years ago, there were requests to me, Can we make this? I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake.

I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.

Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Let me first state that I believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body's way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn't meant to be.

Before and during the first phase of the war his administration repeatedly maligned the UN but now, that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, it is asking the UN for help.

You look at the whole Human Rights questions, I happened to be there at just the right time when the country was awakening - this goes to the first question you asked - the whole country was awakening to a hundred years of injustice that hadn't been resolved yet.

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.

My first figure was a SLAYER eagle. And the dragons and the tribals are all I have got.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

But in the first Gulf war the United Kingdom was not under any threat from Iraq, and is still less so in the second one. Then there is no justification for obstructing freedom of information, particularly as nations have a right to know what their soldiers are being used for.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to, and maybe the first time you do, it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

Christians must be Jews. The truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant.

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.

Success requires first expending ten units of effort to produce one unit of results. Your momentum will then produce ten units of results with each unit of effort.

I want to be the first lady to land a quadruple jump in competition. As I grow older, I know that my skating style will develop and mature.

I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.