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

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.

[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.

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

She looks at me with wide eyes, delight and joy evident, sitting forward, “They are dreaming? You watch dreams? Movie is dream?

I appreciate the beauty and balm of flowers but I have never enjoyed receiving them because then I have to watch them die, and worse...throw them away.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

I must have flowers, always, and always.

Do not consider painful what is good for you.

Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.

I reject the notion that human beings have a single intelligence, which can be drawn on for the full range of problem solving.

We have an electorate that doesn't always pay that much attention to what's going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or truth or what's happening.

Justice is expensive. That is why there is so little of it, and it is reserved for those few with enough money and influence to afford it.

I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.