“It’s not too bad when the sun’s out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.”

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

Listen, if you’re not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh.

Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

We don’t talk, we hold forth. We don’t converse, we expound.

I have scars on my hands from touching certain people…Certain heads, certain colours and textures of human hair leave permanent marks on me.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.

You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

I’m up to my ears in unwritten words.

I hate actors. They never act like people. They just think they do.

I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

How long should a man’s legs be? Long enough to touch the ground.

The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.

I’m one of the little foxes that spoil the grapes.

I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.

Don’t let your sins turn into bad habits.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

Because of the person I am I won’t be knocked down — ever. They can say I’m fat, I’m thin, I’m whatever, and I’ll never stop. I just won’t. I’ve got too much to do. I’ve too much to be happy about.

I want to remember it all, the good times and the bad times, the late nights, the boozing, the dancing into dawns, and all the great and not-so-great people I met and loved in those years.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

I actually have OCD really bad, and it’s getting a bit worse at the moment. I have to check taps before I leave the house, to make sure I’ve checked everything in case it floods.

Most days are not overwhelmingly successful in your life. And what really marks whether you’re going to be successful is how well you deal with the bad days, not how well you deal with the good ones.