Citações

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.

The difference between an entertainment and a novel is about 20,000 words.

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white, but black and grey.

The most extreme changes I have seen in any book of mine were in O Americano Tranquilo (1958); one could almost believe that the film was made deliberately to attack the book and the author, but the book was based on a closer knowledge of the Indo-China war than the American director possessed and I am vain enough to believe that the book will survive a few years longer than Mr Mankiewicz's incoherent picture.

There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.