A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.