If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Home is, I suppose just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

The world is always in movement.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

The moment we stop fighting for each other, that's the moment we lose our humanity.

Willem de Kooning paintings are a language to be learned. When they were first shown, they were ridiculed as being just drips and splatters and splashes. You had to learn how to read them.

You learn more about yourself through your child, I guess.

It's better to look for the people that look like you and do something with them, create something new - the mainstream isn't that special anyways.

Life is an infiltration course. We all try and get through it. We all try and get through it unscathed - maybe not hurt, not bruised. No bones broken, maybe a few hearts here and there.

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.

And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.

It wouldn't be me if I didn't get a little nasty.

I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.