- For an actor, success is simply delayed failure.
- [on Fred Astaire] "The nearest we are ever likely to get to a human Mickey Mouse."
- [writing in 1990] "I have somehow in the last years lost all my interest in films and I don't think I have seen one for the last nearly ten years."
- Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water, they influence the future.
- Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent to the human condition.
- [on Carol Reed] The only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling for the right face in the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathizing with an author's worries and an ability to guide him.
- Surely we choose our death much as we choose our job. It grows out of our acts and our evasions, out of our fears and out of our moments of courage.
- The writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change.
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