I found that life has to be edited to continue.

Art is like a lover whom you run away from but who comes back and picks you up.

There should be something revelatory about art. It should be totally creative and open doors for new thoughts and experiences.

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area

Most people don't do something seminal. I've done it twice: with my tent and my bed. Picasso did it with Cubism.

When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in art – and it's my words that actually make my art quite unique.

What's really good about the word 'art' is that 'art' is a word like 'love,' or 'god,' or whatever. It transcends so many things.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.

There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.

I feel physically ill if I don't make work, I don't create. I don't feel very good. I don't feel right, I feel wrong.

Our identity as Christians is a purpose-driven life

Don't waste your time to appease people who have already stumbled in you because of what you stand for. Respect their decision & move on...

The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true.

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

I think film, to me, as a director, is about telling a story.

the present is the merest flicker between the long long time past and the things that haven't yet happened but most assuredly will.

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.

Criticizing to destroy is easy, thinking in order to build is much more difficult to achieve

When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

If you make a treaty first with the United States and settle the matter of the opium trade, England cannot change this, though she should desire to do so.