"Oh God! I'm going to miss him. I can’t yet imagine life without him. But I guess with God’s help... I'll learn. I keep looking at the photo he gave me of himself, which says, 'To my true love Elizabeth, I love you forever.' And, I will love HIM forever."

"I still can't believe it. I don't want to believe it. It can't be so. He will live in my heart forever but it’s not enough. My life feels so empty. I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The purest most giving love I've ever known."

"My heart…my mind… are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together."

"I've been married too many times. How terrible to change children's affiliations, their affections — to give them the insecurity of placing their trust in someone when maybe that someone won't be there next year."

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

"I'm the same as a key piece of machinery in a steel mill, which is needed to make steel and to make money for the mill owners. If I break down, it's their problem. My problem is to build some kind of decent life for myself in this crazy unreal world in which I make my living."

"I was less pleased than [my friend] to read Elizabeth Taylor's announcement that she had joined the ranks of the sober. Liz Taylor, whom I'd always cherished as one of the few famous women to barrel down the road of excess with a vengeance-eating, drinking, swearing, fucking, marrying, acquiring diamonds as big as the Ritz…"

"There are three things I never saw Elizabeth do: be on time, tell a lie, be unkind to anyone at all."

"Elizabeth Taylor should get a divorce and settle down."

"See what happens? One date with me and Liz ends up engaged to a millionaire."

"When I was younger I thought about becoming a nun for a while. You know how it is when you're growing up and you're going to be a lot of different things, but I actually wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a nun. The nun was more of a side-bar thing."

"I’m always hyper-aware of how not to be a you-know-what. So to actually let it go and to lean into all the ridiculous fame nonsense that I’ve been trying to side-step for all of these years just felt really, really fun. It just felt great and to play someone who had such an enormous ego and someone who takes herself so seriously, and is so insufferable, came very naturally to me."

"I did work at Christie’s for a couple of weeks, getting ready for The Devil Wears Prada, getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art and everybody was really nice. It was great."

"It's easier to think about the way I'm least daring. When I meet people for the first time, I'm friendly but shy. I'm much less outwardly nervous than I used to be, but I still get anxious sometimes. I'm not very daring in my street style, usually because there's a photographer around! I am getting more daring now—I'll wear my mom jeans in public that haven't been tailored 'just so' yet, just because they feel good. For a long time I was afraid of the harsh things people would say about me, but I might as well be happy."

"I have a lot more respect for it as a business. I understand fashion a lot more. Style, for me, is something I still can't get right."

"My entire film career's been dependent on my ability to look unattractive."

"Before I met him, I wasted so much time. I was just annoying and narcissistic and smelled bad. He’s protective without being possessive, passionate without needing to show his temper."

"We've all done things we shouldn't, it's just I did stuff at college, when nobody knew about it, so I'm not a saint. … I wasted time doing self-destructive things but it didn't work. I found out you can only dance on so many tabletops. I got that all out of my system and now I'm healthy and I'm grounded."

"Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy."

"I was hanging out the other night with a bunch of friends I've known forever. They were saying, "Look at you. You've grown into a swan." I looked at them and said, "My awkward phase lasted about three years longer than all of yours combined." I related to the physical and emotional awkwardness Mia goes through. She has incredibly low self-esteem. A lot of my life was spent having the same thing, but I'm getting over that now."

"True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest."

"And every choice, as Gide insisted, entails the rejection of what might have been better."

"When people felt they had a right to seek out Christ before the torment, and in the fullness of his joy—it was too late; the cross had overcome Christ himself; it was Christ crucified that people continued to see and teach. And thus it is that religion came to plunge the world into gloom."

"When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools."

"We call “happiness” a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that needs nothing to feel happy."

"The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness."

"At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing."

"The only really Christian art is that which, like St. Francis, does not fear being wedded to poverty. This rises far above art-as-ornament."

"There is no feeling so simple that it is not immediately complicated and distorted by introspection."

"Often the best in us springs from the worst in us."

"...que toute émotion sache te devenir une ivresse. Si ce que tu manges ne te grise pas, c'est que tu n'avais pas assez faim."

"Familles, je vous hais! foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur."

"La sagesse n'est pas dans la raison, mais dans l'amour."

"Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves."

"O my dearest and most lovable thought, why should I try further to legitimize your birth?"

"The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes."

"Pourtant il me semble que, n'eussé-je connu ni Dostoïevski, ni Nietzsche, ni Freud, ni X. ou Z., j'aurais pensé tout de même, et que j'ai trouvé chez eux plutôt une autorisation qu'un éveil. Surtout ils m'ont appris à ne plus douter de moi-même, à ne pas avoir peur de ma pensée et à me laisser mener par elle, puisqu'aussi bien je les y retrouvais."

"Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools."

"Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him."

"In my present insistence on high standards you will see that there is less self-indulgence than resolve and application. I do not let the Christian monopolize the ideal of perfection. I have my own virtue, which I am constantly cultivating and refining by teaching myself not to tolerate in me or my surroundings anything but the exquisite."

"A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective."

"The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity."

"Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon."

"The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious."

"No theory is good unless it permits, not rest, but the greatest work. No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go on beyond."

"The abominable effort to take one's sins with one to paradise."

"Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all."

"The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?"

"Savoir se libérer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir être libre."

"Toutes choses sont dites déjà; mais comme personne n'écoute, il faut toujours recommencer."