A good film is always nourishing. It's not about it being hopeful or bleak; it's about how it touches you, how it moves or stirs you.

I wanted to paint pictures of people. I thought, "Why bother doing anything else. Everything else is a waste of time. I want to tell stories about people and their feelings and emotions."

You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

You always feel very vulnerable when you put your work out there. You feel a kind of nakedness. And you expose something of the inner workings of the way you experience life.

I think it's important to make art that is not that easily absorbable, that is a challenge to the authorities.

I think great art goes beyond the control of the artist. In some ways, art often makes itself and reveals things about that artist that maybe the artist is not fully conscious of.

If you don't have your unconscious working for you, you're really out of luck as an artist.

There was an expression of intensity in dance that was so compelling to me that I wanted a piece of that action.

I'm not trying to be a finger-wagger at society. I sort of start with myself.

I think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.

Sometimes audiences love you because they get to boo you.

Writing opens the door to imagination.

What can you do for love?Can you leave a person for love?Can you leave a country for love?I think I wouldn't even leave my couch for love

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

We never had a bathtub. Mom would bathe me in the wooden or tin washtub in the kitchen, or in a big lard can.

Better to live or die, once and for all, than die by inches.

Because,” he said quietly as she stood up, “until you walked into it, this was an ordinary garden.” Puzzled, Elizabeth tipped her head. “What is it now?” “Heaven.

When you control the ball you control the score

Once elected, the Pope is by virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the Pope is preserved from the possibility of error. God would change any spend thrift politician into a responsible Pope.

What miracle is God fashioning out of this misfortune?

I love editing, and I don't mind when things are edited and you can see the editing.