Don't waste your time on life.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.

The tragedy is women of color have made more progress in basketball than they have in broadcasting.

It's very odd to observe someone else taking your identity into their own hands and getting it all wrong. I don't think most people will ever get to experience how truly weird it is.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

A lot of getting a song done is booking the studio time. I'm the kind of person who will set time aside to do something and then do everything but that thing.

Death opens the gate of fame, and shuts the gate of envy after it; it unlooses the chain of the captive, and puts the bondsman's task into another man's hand.

Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

I prefer to live in the country where it's quiet. Woody Allen movies there are dubbed into Italian.

If you can't take the heat, don't tickle the dragon.

I don't know if I would call it therapy, but filmmaking is really the only thing I know how to do. For me, making movies is a way to bring on change for myself, and I really enjoy that part.