I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.

life is a story and god is author.life is absurd.I think so.

It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books.

A person may be very secretive and yet have no secrets.

No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in hid eyrie at night!

If you think one piece of creation is better than another, you have completely lost it.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Thousands and thousands of colors paint the bosom of the earth so gaily.

The thing is, I think as a director or a writer or whatever, you have to have a vision. And you have to be maybe sometimes too early, somewhere.