When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
Many people are target people. Once when Louis B. Mayer insulted me I poured a glass of water over his head.
I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they'll run the other way.
If I had my way everyone would have a psychiatrist. When the brain is sick and you must throw up, you do it by being purged in a psychiatrist's office.
I appreciate subtlety. I have never enjoyed a kiss in front of the camera. There's nothing to it except not getting your lipstick smeared.
Confidence is something you're born with. I know I had loads of it even at the age of 15.
American men, as a group, seem to be interested in only two things, money and breasts. It seems a very narrow outlook.
I am well aware that there is such a great craving in man for heroism and the heroic, and that hero worship forms not a small motif in his complex. I am also aware that, unless man believes in his own heroism and the heroism of others, he cannot achieve much or great things. We must, however, take proper care that we do not make a fetish of this cult of hero-worship, for then we will turn ourselves into votaries of false gods and prophets.
[On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.
In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame.
It's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.