When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life. . .
To get fifty people to a cocktail party in New York, you ask one hundred. In Hollywood, you invite twenty.
Down with boredom. It has to go.
People who have escaped from poverty are like old soldiers. In later years they recount the little, amusing incidents that happened infrequently, and conveniently forget the long, unrelieved stretches of misery and boredom.
A bore is a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you.
Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!
[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.
The best books come from someplace deep inside. . . . Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.
They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff.
We all had such larks. Yes, it was hard work but the friendships and the genuine respect we had for one another, that side I shall miss greatly. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions.
Less feelings means less goodbyes.