“What you need is someone to take hold of you–gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of–and I can! I’m determined to do it–and nothing’s more determined than a cat on a tin roof–is there?”

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

A bedroom is just as nice as whoever sleeps in it with you.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

Certain people always say we should go back to nature.I notice they never say we should go forward to nature.

Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s own need to think.

There’s a Washington standard of casually putting things off the record. It’s really gone too far. I don’t know an easy way to turn it back.

That has a continuous and robust inspection mechanism and that has snap-back provisions in case Iran violates the agreement.

Normally, you have all this knowledge from all the films that you’ve done that you’ve accumulated over the years

” What do you mean? What you mean is that they want to look back in history. And so I think it’s only natural for entertainment to reflect that.

And you can constantly look back when you’re in some sort of fix and say, “Well, on so-and-so film, we did this, and it worked out fine.”

I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard.