Being an artist, it's always tempting to measure success through other people's eyes, be they critics, journalists or audiences.

Art is incredibly subjective. What is great art to one person isn't necessarily to another.

I want young women to think about different possibilities for their lives.

I want people to consider the idea that the only way of moving forward with their lives is to revisit and confront their issues and their pasts.

I measure the success of my work by the way I feel about a film before anyone else has seen it. I think I can trust myself to know when the work is good and deep and interesting and when it isn't.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

He is hard, frozen ice cream and I am a weak spoon. What I've learned is this: You don't get much ice cream for all the hard work you put in, and the spoon ends up bent.

Great fortune and peace of mind seldom live together.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Poverty cannot deprive us of many consolations. It cannot rob us of the affection we have for each other, or degrade us in our own opinion, of in that of any person, whose opinion we ought to value.

One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

When you face a fork in the road, step on the exhilarator!

There is a price for popularity. Critics look for your weaknesses, your flaws, anything that makes the work seem like a fluke and not seem worthy of all the attention it's getting.

In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.