I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza.

Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

There are two cinemas: the films we have actually seen and the memories we have of them.

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.

The Internet is democracy's revenge on democracy.

For a woman there is nothing more erotic than being understood.

Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends.

One of the attributes of love . . . is to bring harmony and order out of chaos.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

it is sad to fill a grave with a person full of potential yet completely emptied of anymore possibility to try it once again.

It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

On film, it's really nice to see that transformation from the beginning, reading the script, to know where he starts and where he ends, and be able to plan for that.

I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.

She pulls the eyes out with a face like a magnet.

Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.

...the counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life.

And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.