“The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

We all have a role to play in achieving this goal.

We can never achieve absolute truth but we can live hopefully by a system of calculated probabilities.

So I think we have a lot of room to grow and be a better society, and it’s a constant battle. It’s an exciting opportunity to be active.

The challenge, really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few moments that aren’t cliche.

If it’s something I can’t achieve, I tell them straight.

There is a political process which we are trying to achieve through what is called the Vienna Group.

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.