Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

The most important thing in our lives is what we are doing now.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be only to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

One of the greatest evils of the day among those outside of prison is their sense of futility. Young people say, What is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.

If a man is called to be a streetsweep-er, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Prose, in his experience, calls for many more words than poetry. There is no point in embarking on prose if one lacks confidence that one will be alive the next day to carry on with the task.

Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!

The transition from TV to films wasn't overwhelming, since an actor's ultimate job is to act.