“Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.”

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

It’s much harder to act in a bad film than in a good one. A terrible script makes for very difficult acting. You can win an Academy Award for some of the easiest acting in your career, made possible by a brilliant script.

Whatever befalls us has its meaning; though it is often hard to grasp. In the Book of Life every page has two sides. On the upper one, we inscribe our plans, dreams and hopes; the reverse is filled by providence, whose verdicts rarely match our desire.

It’s very hard not to be condescending when you’re explaining something to an idiot.

The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.

Die Hard 2 was okay. It was a little outside the template but it was okay, a hard movie to make technically. Did well at the box office. Successful.