“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.

How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don’t know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people.

At one time I thought the most important thing was talent.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love.

Good ones don’t have time to bother with success or getting rich.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

One only is immutable, eternal and ever endures, one and the same with itself. With this philosophy my spirit grows, my mind expands.

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them.

You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.