"Son, do you know how love should be begun?" The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: "A tree. A rock. A cloud."

"Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen."

"In her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music."

"That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name."

"The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."

"It was like she was so empty there wasn't even a feeling or thought in her."

"The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished....."

"It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright."

"The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen."

"It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated."

"The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy."

"It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them."

"Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage."

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it."

"Sometimes I feel like I've got my nose pressed up against the window of a bakery, only I'm the bread."

"When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?'"

"I am not a person who yells at all, but I realized that I have always felt so good after doing the Tarzan yell, after doing Charo, or screaming as Eunice."

"I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me."

"Just scream! You vent, and the body just feels good after a good old yell."

"I've always been optimistic. And I have a feeling that it happened because of going to all those movies with my grandmother in the '40s because there was no cynicism."

"I never felt cynical, and I never felt that I couldn't do what I wanted to do."

"I never regretted turning down anything, I never regretted losing a job because I always felt something else was out there."

"It's also selfish because it makes you feel good when you help others. I've been helped by acts of kindness from strangers. That's why we're here, after all, to help others."

"It's too late for me to get married before I'm famous. You never know people's intentions."