"My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS, but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives."

“I believe how I act today will affect how I am tomorrow.”

“Prayer is not a preparation for the battle; it is the battle!”

“Each of us has something within us which won't be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die. We are what we are, that's all. Like the old Celtic legend of the bird with the thorn in its breast, singing its heart out and dying. Because it has to, its self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own thorns, and never stop to count the cost. All we can do is suffer the pain, and tell ourselves it was well worth it.”

Source : Colleen McCullough (2013). “The Thorn Birds”, p.610, Head of Zeus

“Local esteem is far more conducive to happiness than general reputation. The latter may be compared to the fixed stars which glimmer so remotely as to afford little light and no warmth. The former is like the sun, each day shedding his prolific and cheering beams.”

Source : William Benton Clulow (1843). “Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion”, p.415

“The only time I'm pleased with myself is when I'm exhausted and shaking from having written too much.”

“You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.”

“Be silent in a group of people See what they reveal to you.”

Source : Yoko Ono (2013). “Acorn”, p.88, Algonquin Books

“I am here to act only in films with good script.”