Quotes to inspire and reflect

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

As the age of television progresses the Reagan's will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarized republic.

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.

It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, I have observed, when it does.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.

Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Life is hard.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.

Life is a cinch.

Yard by yard.

All vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first.

Inch by inch.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.