Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.

You lose your manners when you are poor.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier.

Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Success isn't everything but it makes a man stand straight.

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Drinking makes uninteresting people matter less and late at night matter not at all.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

I think people always believe what they want to believe, don't you?

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

I knew I wanted to act, and I was really driven, so I kept going for it. We moved to L.A. full-time when I was 8 or 9.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

I'm a 7 o'clock act. My people want to go to a show, a dinner and then go home and go to bed.

For me, romance isn't an over-the-top act. It's someone offering to help and to support me. Or if that person thinks I'm making the wrong decision, he'll tell me. I want him to be honest, because being that honest takes a lot of guts.

I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.