“I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes – they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn’t have much of a social life.”

In a marriage, you struggle and struggle and struggle, and then you realize that you have to ride the horse in the direction it’s going. You stop trying to pull the reins in another direction.

People have an obligation to live up to their potential.

Honey, I can smell the scent of another woman from 500 paces.

Even if the whole human race dies off because we keep fighting and killing each other and being heartless, the planet will take care of itself. Eventually, after millions of years.

Total contentment is only for cows.

If you’re passionate about something, then you should pick up your flag and run with it.

A lot of people say that my life is wasted on me because I could be a bigger asshole than I am, but I’ve chosen not to be.

The outside world doesn’t have a lot to offer. You have to make your own heaven in your own home.

There’s a kind of emotional exploration you plumb with a friend that you don’t really do with your family.

I’m mad about God! That’s why I’m divine.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

[On Denmark:] … that little country of cottage cheese and courage.

I tried to charm the pants off Bob Dylan, but everyone will be disappointed to learn that I was unsuccessful. I got close – a couple of fast feels in the front seat of a Cadillac.

Men’s brains are smaller than those of women so they can fit into their penises.

The [film] business is run by men, and they’re basically interested in their own species, and they’re not so interested in women belonging to the human race.

After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.

When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there.

I was given some Harry Potter books by a young friend. I wanted to know why young people liked it so much. And I noted that there were some values in Harry Potter that are common to many books that are popular all over the world. In the end,

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

My problem is that people have been writing books about me.A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don’t fight about it.

I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

I don’t normally have time to read, so when I go away I like to take a few books.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.