“A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

All intimacies are based on differences.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.

Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Sometimes people get really sniffy about the films you choose if you’ve done more dramatic projects or you’re classically trained.

Rock ‘n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

Frequently on the lunar surface I said to myself, ‘This is the Moon, that is the Earth. I’m really here, I’m really here!’

I’d really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it’s the wrong century.

It’s exciting to be with really, really good people. Some people make you feel like you’ve got to up your game.

I wouldn’t do my roles if I really hated it. I’ve done things I hated, but I didn’t go into them thinking I would hate them. I want to have fun. I don’t want to go to work and not enjoy it.

The things like that we could fight about, we really don’t. We are pretty lucky for that.