There should be a point to movies. Sure, you’re giving people a diversion from the cold world for a bit, but at the same time, you pass on some facts and rules and maybe a little bit of wisdom.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Pop music will never be low brow.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.

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.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

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.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

We don’t want people to leave the stadium until the game finishes.

The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it’s so much fun.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

My friend James Cameron and I made three films together – True Lies, The Terminator and Terminator 2. Of course, that was during his early, low-budget, art-house period.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

One whose knowledge is confined to books and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge nor wealth when the need for them arises.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

It would be a terrific innovation if you could get your mind to stretch a little further than the next wisecrack.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

If you wished to be loved, love.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it’s so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

People are using Windows PCs more than they watch TV now.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

Maybe stories are just data with a soul.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

I have lived long enough both in years and in accomplishments.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.