As a teenager I was obsessed with music and with writing and performing songs.

I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

Your most important fight will be the ones that you knew knew couldn't win but you fought as hard as you could anyway.

Now is the time to enliven, ennoble and enrich your life's tapestry.

A gold standard doesn't imply stability in the prices of the goods and services that people buy every day, it implies a stability in the price of gold itself.

It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not.

I want to have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Our life must once have end; in vain we fly From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.

I'm not always thinking and working ... I think a leader has to really be a balanced, whole and healthy person personally in order to be the best leader on the job.

All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.

He who serves the most, reaps the most, emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.

I was an only child. I did have kind of like a lonely existence.