All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

You hear about actors being late and all that sort of stuff, but you never find that with an actor who’s directed, because an actor who’s directed understands all the problems your production is going through.

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed – and they’re, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

We as women, we have to understand that we know more, just even instinctively, than we think we do.

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

History is more or less bunk.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

I don’t have a problem with Hulk Hogan. People say things and do things, and who am I to judge?

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

God never gives someone a gift they are not capable of receiving. If he gives us the gift of Christmas, it is because we all have the ability to understand and receive it.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

I’d like to believe that the people that have supported me in my work or identified with me in films, the people that feel they know me, they do and they don’t have misconceptions – they understand. I believe that.

Fame doesn’t fulfill you. It warms you a bit, but that warmth is temporary.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.