Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

The myth that theater isn't for everybody is total nonsense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, everybody in America used to go to the theater all the time. The shows they went to see were big, crazy melodramas that had careening storylines and houses burning down and pretty girls in danger and comedy and death and destruction.

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

I really just try to focus on my job, which is to be an actor, and outside that, the cards fall where they may, and on not getting caught up in how people react to certain things. That's a death trap creatively.

I'm really tired of making these huge, over-$100 million movies where they literally mean life and death for a studio. It's really rough making these expensive movies. Everyone is hysterical.