I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, 'Oh, anyone can be a writer. It's like being a firefighter or a lawyer.'

Because I think in order to get famous you have to be known for something. Like 'You're the romantic comedy girl' or 'You're the Oscar-winning whatever girl.'

My real fantasy if I was to drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks and nose rings - and play the flute.

Fame, I have already. Now I need the money.

Quentin is very organic; there was no way that he was going to put someone else's hand in there and anyway, my hands are kind of famous. It seemed right.

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But, no, it doesn't scare me at all.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

But, Tarantino has seen all of my movies. He's seen my good stuff, he's seen my bad stuff, he's seen the ones I directed, he's read my autobiography. There's an awful lot of things he knows about me, all of which I think had something to do with his casting.

I don't need to convince anybody that I know kung fu, but maybe somebody needs to know that I really can act, without doing a Chinese accent or a funny walk.

Before I became famous I had a very full life, and that gave me a lot to pick from. I always use everything. It always comes in handy. Working with animals... Well, I just enjoyed that. That was the most peaceful time.

My music is about a joyful experience. I've learned that if you can affect other people, you should.

You always have to remember - no matter what you're told - that God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.

I don't have good business sense. You never get much money for the arts. But I like independence. I like to grow.

My mother said I was a little odd as a kid. I was alone a lot, but I didn't feel alone.

I lucked out when I started to sing. I'd already experienced failing at everything else.

I don't feel famous.

I'd like to classify my life as a romantic comedy. Unfortunately I feel it's probably more like a TV reality show.

It is better to have a relationship with someone who cheats on you than with someone who does not flush the toilet.

I spent the first fourteen years of my life convinced that my looks were hideous. Adolescence is painful for everyone, I know, but mine was plain weird.

Why should it matter to us when wrestlers are found dead in their beds or seen limping around on two fake hips? Why should it matter to us that there's a list of modern wrestlers who died before the age of 50 - many of them famous - and that the list is more than 70 names long? Hey, there's always another wave of guys on the way. Always.

Fame is a lot of pressure, especially when you're responsible for your entire family. Financially, emotionally - everything.

I used to try to draw my girlfriends. I think one of the most romantic things that anybody can do is draw a portrait of the person you love.

Live life to the fullest, for the future is scarce.

It's like Forrest Gump said, 'Life is like a box of chocolates.' Your career is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get. But everything you get is going to teach you something along the way and make you the person you are today. That's the exciting part - it's an adventure in itself.

I freak out if I go a little too long without being in the gym. For a long time it was all about getting the weight off because I was 240 pounds at my heaviest, and now I'm around 175, so the majority of that weight loss was due to diet and exercise.

I'm glad that my parents missed one thing that was really unbelievable. They saw me hit this great success. It was a blast and we had a lot of laughs. And it was just an amazing time. They passed away. And then after I got, you know, famous, all these haters came out of nowhere.

My professional dreams were coming true while I was living a personal nightmare.

I always thought that if I got no love at all early in my standup career, or I was god awful, I thought I'd get into psychology.

I'm completely ecstatic when a woman has own back story and brings something to the table and has a real strong kind of independence.

Anger has a way of seeping into every other emotion and planting itself in there.

In school I was pretty quiet. Kinda shy until my junior year. But at home I was a freak.

My fam is just a regular family. But all of them have great senses of humor.

My great-grandmother was born in London, the daughter of a Brixton coachman, and became the most famous singer in Australia. Her name was Marie Carandini, Madame Carandini.

On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.

There is something sad about malevolence, to be wicked. I have always tried to make that come across in the villains I have played.

'The Impossible Dream' is, in my opinion, one of the greatest songs ever written. Here is a man, an old man, a very old man full of daring, bravery, courage, determination, romanticism and dreams.

I wasn't a spy. I'd have been spotted in five seconds. Yes, I was in intelligence, but that covered a multitude of things.

Ian Fleming was my cousin, you know. He was in naval intelligence.

The secret to a long marriage in the film industry? Marry someone wonderful, as I did. And always have her come along on location.

I associate heavy metal with fantasy because of the tremendous power that the music delivers.

Acting as a profession came to me by chance: in 1946, after the war, I was having lunch with my cousin, who was the Italian ambassador, and he asked, 'What are you going to do now you're out of uniform?' I said, 'I'm pretty inventive, and I can imitate people,' and he said, 'Have you thought about being an actor?'

It's what you don't see that keeps you on the edge of your seat in any kind of film - leave it to the imagination of the viewer.

It's my observation that gardeners and gardening for a very long time have had to take a back seat. Architects are very famous; they've got huge projects. What goes on in and around them has been relegated to a very minor role.

For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.

Rejection is the one constant of human experience.

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

I've always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother's friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.

The 'Reader's Digest' used to run a feature called 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.' The new wisdom - post-Trump and Brexit - is that it doesn't.