Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it.

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges...

Herman Melville

Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility in a sense - the idea that anyone can make it.

Fareed Zakaria

I hastened to quench a thirst that had been burning a hole in the mixed metaphor of my life ever since I had fondled a quite different Dolly thirteen years earlier.

Vladimir Nabokov

There are few people who are not ashamed of their love affairs when the infatuation is over.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Quite a nasty piece of work. Not the sort of person you'd want to have dinner with. On the subject of Mr. Bean

Rowan Atkinson

I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now.

Patty Duke

I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

Mark Twain

New Yorkers love it when you spill your guts out there. Spill your guts at Wimbledon and they make you stop and clean it up.

Jimmy Connors

It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

Henry David Thoreau

Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.

Sigmund Freud

of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.

C.S. Lewis

I feel like people start to believe things that people say about them and start to think they're really important. If you have a family that is down to earth and cool, I don't see how you can be like that.

Amanda Bynes