Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, ''You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been.'' Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

Dan: "Wow, I'm a complete idiot!" James: "Okay hold on, lemme get this on paper.

I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

You're so violent. You watch James Bond.

In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

Henry James created more convincing women than Iris Murdoch put together.

Erwin: "Where are you going?" James: "To my woom" Erwin: "Your WOMB? That's a long, tight trip!

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night.

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies -- and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.

I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

Dan: "Ya know when cats are fat they're bigger than the ones who aren't fat, did ya know that?" James: "No Dan I didn't. Please do expand" Dan: "Huh?

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -- hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.

Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all -- save ''a man with a red moustache,'' ''a young man in gray smoking a pipe.''

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

Deborah: My friend said she might come to the next meeting. James: Is she hot? Deborah: No, but she's Canadian!

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo the splendor of fame fades into nothing but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

Carter This is the United States of James Carter here. I'm the president, I'm the emperor, I'm the king. I'm Michael Jackson, you Tito

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

Why don't you write books people can read?;"Nora Joyce, to her husband James

He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.

While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either.

Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?

Discussion in America means dissent.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, ''How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?'' and avoid ''How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?''