The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

It's frustrating not to have more control over your material.

Grossing Out dealt with the western nations selling arms to the Third World and exploiting these countries.

I met Claxton on the set of The Cincinnati Kid.

Blue Movie was based on an idea that Stanley Kubrick had. Somebody came by one day with some porn footage.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

I like to work at night.

For a director and a producer to be named on the writing credits is practically unheard of.

In the case of The Loved One, I was hired to collaborate on an updated version of the book.

I met The Beatles and Stones at the same time, because Michael Cooper was doing several of their album covers.

David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best.

When Kubrick decided to go the black comedy route with his movie, he thought of me to give it that flavor.

In that sense, film is superior, but the difficulty is your lack of control as a writer.

The Loved One has been the most underrated film I've worked on.

It was a good experience working with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

Sometimes we would be staked out in the middle of the river, several barges tied together. So we could party.

After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector.

It's often the case with directors that they don't like to share credit, which is the case of Stanley. He would prefer just A Film By Stanley Kubrick including music and everything.

An angel has no memory.

Peter Beard is one of those people I've known a long time. We have an affinity. We share certain values.

Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.

When I finally made it to the set, I spent a lot of time doing damage control on The Magic Christian.

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Obedience to the word in humility of mind never confuses.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think.

Any political party that includes the word 'democratic' in its name, isn't.