“You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.”

Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.

Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.

Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.

It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.

One must dare to be happy.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

I’ve still got a brilliant head of hair, which refuses to lay down.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

For the demise of the Latin monarch, he who will reign with help and support will burn a brilliant fire. The Republic’s booty divided and its bold dream disappeared.

I’m a huge Aamir Khan fan. I love Aamir, so everything he does is brilliant. We expect something different from somebody like Aamir, whether it’s in promotion, or whether it’s in a film, and plus it has RajKumar Hirani.

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that’s what you seem to have mastered. You’ve used silence to great advantage in the film. It’s brilliant.

An average person with average talents and average ambition can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society; if that person has clear focused goals.

Will opens the door to success, both brilliant and happy.