I truly believe that all power corrupts. Such is probably the thinking behind every political film ever made in Hollywood.
For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, aren't we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?
It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.
...an irresistible sleep fell deeply on his eyes, the sweetest, soundest oblivion, still as the sleep of death itself...
Stands the clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?
I believe that true beauty of chess is more than enough to satisfy all possible demands.
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?
The truth is, I have more money than I'm interested in spending. Everyone in my family is taken care of.
I suspect there isn't an actor alive who was able to truthfully answer his family's questions after his first day's activity in his future profession.
I think that's become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family - a statement - and you can afford it, then that's a noble project.
In China, the dead are not forgotten - my relatives cheerfully pointed out all the niches of deceased friends and family, as if gesturing at the homes of the living.
No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.
Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?
My father was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, and he picked cotton for a dollar a day. He was working for the family from the time he was 7.
I suggested that we had experience in helping other countries build their military forces, and we would be willing and happy to do the same for Afghanistan, together with the United States.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
Bread pudding makes me weak. I have been known to be moved to tears by cookies and ice cream, and ribs are a spiritual experience for me.
