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

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

Everything human is alien to me.

Life is a long failure of understanding ... a long, mistaken shutting of the heart.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

For neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.

It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?

Fascinated by the great symbols of the collective history, I use them as an alphabet to communicate.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

MOTHER TIME: The past is always with us, dear, for better or worse. It is what it is and you can't change it. All you can do is learn how to live with it in the present.

It was just this crazy craziness, and the fact that it was shot in Paris, and it had these incredible people in it. It was an easy thing to say yes to.

Like many other much-loved humans, they believed that they owned their dogs, instead of realizing that their dogs owned them.

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

Remember, the greater the opportunity, the fewer are those who see it.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

Fuel conservation is a necessity, and I have to be the first person to set the example.

There's never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he's an arrant knave.