“Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”

Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.