I really haven’t had that exciting of a life. There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life. So I pretty much like to make it up. I’d rather tell a story about somebody else.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

I love stories about women.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

I’m not searching for hard news; I’m not a journalist, but I’m interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it’s a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven’t flinched.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

I sell escapism.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

I’m so wrapped up in my work that it’s often impossible to consider other things in my life. My marriage ended in divorce because of this, my relationship with Holly has suffered by this.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.

I look at athletes in all sports and try to picture what kind of football player they’d be, what position they’d play and so on.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

I never played with anything like toys.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Some Christians feel guilty when they are doing something that isn’t ‚spiritual.‘ Somehow or another, they feel the need to hurry through the grocery store, dash through the house cleaning, and rush through all the daily aspects of life that seem irrelevant to their faith.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

When I meet people who say – which they do all of the time – ‚I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,‘ and so forth, I switch off quite early.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.