Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble.

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.

I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

Should I marry W.? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name.

You will notice that what we are aiming at when we fall in love is a very strange paradox. The paradox consists of the fact that, when we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom we were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all of the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted upon us. So that love contains in it the contradiction: The attempt to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.

I've gained no wisdom, no insight, no mellowing. I would make all the same mistakes again, today.

I have a great admiration for English actors and actresses and have used them at every opportunity over the years, but now I won't have to import them to New York.