“If you have a choice of selling shoes to ladies or giving birth to a flaming porcupine… look into that second, less painful career.”

“If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes. This is a tough business.”

“You aren’t old enough to have such regrets.”
“Pain doesn’t respect age, my lady.”

“Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.”

“The breathing of the air,
The song of the sweet nightingale,
The grove and its beauty
In the serene night,
With the flame that consumes, and gives no pains. ~ 39”

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself”

“In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.”

“I was once — and only once — asked if I could have had a writing career without the movies. That stopped me, and I was very happy to have to think about it, and decide I knew the answer. Yes; not this career, but a career. Without movie money, either from writing screenplays or selling rights to novels, I could still have enough of a career that I could support myself and not have to work at some other job, but it would be, shall we say, a less lavish lifestyle.”

“I rang my mother to thank her for giving birth to me and she said, "What choice had I? You were in there, how else were you going to get out?”