To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac.

We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.

I'm afraid of only two things: being lazy and being cowardly.

Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'