"You are the age of your spine. You are as flexible as your spine. That transfers to other areas of your life."

"I believe that the female perspective is a very healing and circumspect one, and we have a right to equal voice."

"Self-respect is a commodity worth cleaving to."

"Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes."

"It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date."

"Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."

"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing."

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child."

"Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing."

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

"You will never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race."

"I want to sit down, and I want to laugh. Nothing works better for me than watching somebody slip on a banana peel."

"I'm a girl, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate greatness and the struggle of sports. My situation - and I've always said this, even in politics - is may the best man win. I'm not team-bound."

"For me, I don't even like to promote my films but I have to because it's in the fine print of my contract."

"It's always refreshing to step into another time."

"To me, there's no greater reward than being around people you care about and can be present with."

"My relationship with aging is cozy. I'm not trying to play 29 and holding on with white knuckles, you know?"

"Playing dead is difficult with a full bladder."

"The largest room in the world is room for improvement. You know, some mornings my thighs are fat. Some days my hair looks great. That's the human condition."

"I don't want to live in a bubble, in my craft or in the world... I can't, I would be cheating myself out of my generation and the world we live in."

"A lot can change in the editing room."

"The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor."

"The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted."

"You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes."

"Common people do not pray; they only beg."

"All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions."

"All problems are finally scientific problems."

"Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap"

"The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her."

"You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time."

"I think that anybody that smiles automatically looks better."

"All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed - the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?"

"Some people fascinate me. They really worship at the altar of their careers, you know? And it's terrifying. It's sort of like setting a table and waiting for someone to come along and whoosh - push all the plates onto the floor."

"Love is saying you're sorry. It's the opposite of those cherub posters that say, 'Love is never having to say you're sorry.' Wrong! Love is three sorrys a day. If you haven't met that quota, something's wrong."

"I can tell you that, you know, when I went to my first movie premiere, it was my own movie, and I wore the best jeans I had and my favorite top. You know, I made sure my hair had some wave in it because I braided it the night before myself."

"You have to realize, making movies is the weirdest thing you could ever do. It's a contrivance, but you're attempting to reach people's hearts in the dark, and there are so many factors that are out of your control."

"I remember 'vulnerability' being an unattractive word for most of my life, and I resented it as a direction coming from a director just because it implied weakness so I get the job. But it is that humbling place that creates compassion."

"Anyone who's had a finger pointed at them and been told they're pretty or attractive, there's a power that comes with that. But beauty for a woman becomes cumbersome because it's always being equated with youth."

"I've heard stories of people, even celebrities that have gone online, pretended to be someone they weren't, and conducted a 5-year friendship via e-mail. Then, they got married because they really love each other from all that communication."

"I was, I think, extremely lucky, because the minute I saw my face plastered on 'Time' magazine in the subway with my mother, I just said, 'Wow.' And it made 'Time' magazine come down to life-size scale."

"You see the movie with the music and the editing and all the parts that you weren't there for when it was being filmed, and you really appreciate all the names that are scrolling by. You realize that you accomplished so much."

"I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady."

"There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses"

"Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence"

"A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures."

"It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls."

"What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

"Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's"