“You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.”

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.

I just hope that one day – preferably when we’re both blind drunk – we can talk about it.

Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos.

An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

People always clap for the wrong reasons.

I love to write and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.

Men are most virile and most attractive between the ages of 35 and 55. Under 35 a man has too much to learn, and I don’t have time to teach him.

You have to teach yourself to act but Michael Chekhov will give you the necessary tools – and for me, Psychological Gesture and Centers are extremely valuable They work like a charm. I’ve used them all along and still do.

The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country.

I wanted to use my experience to teach kids that racism has no place in hearts and minds.

If I have any worth, it is to live my life for God so as to teach these peoples; even though some of them still look down on me.

Teaching is one of the noblest of professions. It requires an adequate preparation and training, patience, devotion, and a deep sense of responsibility. Those who mold the human mind have wrought not for time, but for eternity.

You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.

The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.