"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life."

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."

"Don't try to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible."

"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."

"Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"My prerogative right now is to just chill and let all the other overexposed blondes on the cover of Us Weekly (magazine) be your entertainment."

"I belong to an ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe... I am a storyteller."

"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."

"What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."

"Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into."

"In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."