Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

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.

You may be wrong at first

Preservation of the past has been one of humankind’s chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving.

Creating something new is easy, creating something that lasts is the challenge.

The grossest, the cruelest, the most selfish, the most easily pervertible and perverted thing in this world, is government.

I certainly believe that being in contact with ones spirit and nurturing ones spirit is as important as nurturing ones body and mind. We are three dimensional beings: body, mind, spirit.

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

There is always room for coincidence.

It's just, it's fun to stay in the game.

A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.