“Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.”

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.

You have to learn to do everything, even to die.

Art isn’t everything. It’s just about everything.

Art is the pulse of a nation.

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

There is a calmness in not knowing.

It is common, to esteem most what is most unknown.

My mum never understood how much I earned. When I told her I earned a million pounds a film, she said, ‘How much is that?’

I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the woman I wanted to be.

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last.

Not knowing anything is the sweetest life.