The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.

To be honest, I am often unsettled by the responses some people have had to my movies, and that includes many people who like them.

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get...

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn’t even know how to aim the camera in those days.

I think the biggest thing that we are going to be able to do is focus on training, practicing, working on my starts, and taking each race one at a time.

Humor can be an incredible, lacerating and effective weapon.

All I do is go to the movies.

Hope is tomorrow’s veneer over today’s disappointment.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

There is a method which distinguishes SF from fantasy, though a lot of the science fiction written does not go by that method, and some fantasy does.

God and the politicians willing, the United States can declare peace upon the world, and win it.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

I don’t think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets...

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

My guiding thought throughout was that the real Marine story had not been told. We were a different breed of men who looked at war in a different way.

Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed.

But anonymity is very important to me, and I don’t want to be recognized in public more than I already am.

A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother’s love endures through all.

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.

I think a lot of the difference between my newer work and the older work is that I would have tried to imply some of those things before.

Instead, there were a variety of controls of which some could be influenced by bankers, some could be influenced by the government, and some could hardly be influenced by either.

That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.

There’s been a big buzz about the Charlatans in the last couple of years. I’ve heard the word Charlatans more in the last few years than I’d heard it for the previous 20 years. People...

It’s like Samson and Delilah: watch your back, because trouble could be the person you’re sleeping with.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

The most desirable aspects of the Law of the Sea Treaty pertain to navigational rights.

Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn’t understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.

When you’re interviewing someone, even your mother – you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what’s the...

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp...

Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.

I never played inside as a kid – even in the rain I’d go out.

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It’s an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything...

It’s not about retro or modern, it’s about this note or that note, which sounds better?

It’s been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!

Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.

My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven’t cheated.

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.

However difficult it may be to bring it about, some form of world government, with agreed international law and means of enforcing the law, is inevitable.

Oh, that sound? I’m in the hot tub, reading a novel.

Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats.

I do not write for an audience.