Quotes to inspire and reflect

You can live to be a 100 if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a 100.

I’m 74 years old and even though I may be a bit of a rascal… 33 girls in two months seems to me too much even for a 30-year-old.

I recently turned 60. Practically a third of my life is over.

Life begins at 40—but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person three or four times.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

The reason why so many people showed up at his [Louis B. Mayer’s] funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead.

Never let that son of a bitch in the studio again—until we need him.

We in the industry know that behind every successful screenwriter stands a woman. And behind her stands his wife.

We’re overpaying him, but he’s worth it.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Show business is dog-eat-dog. It’s worse than dog-eat-dog, it’s-dog-doesn’t-return-other-dog’s-phone-calls.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women

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

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Envy is the central fact of American life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

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

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

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

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

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