I go out there. I'm out there every day. [Pause] There is nothing out there.
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field. . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.
. . . I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.