I was the only westerner to succeed in a place that's like a toilet, and you always come out of a toilet with a smell.

A marriage is like a long trip in a tiny row boat: if one passenger starts to rock the boat, the other has to steady it, otherwise, they will go to the bottom together.

The hospital that feeds you refined sugar, white bread, canned soup, bouillon cubes, and frozen vegetables should be closed by the health department as a menace to the public health.

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.

Spirituality gives sacredness of strength.

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.

I cannot believe that a republic could subsist if the influence of the lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.

The United Nations system is still the best instrument for making the world less fragile.

I am rather in favour of dealing with teenage hooliganism.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

Some of the ideas are kind of inspired by the songs, and I always want to use music to tell the story and give the movie a certain kind of mood. That's always essential to me.