Now I see it clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.

The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.

Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

Let's just shoot in black and white. Don't explain why. Have no reason for it. Just do it because it's interesting.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

One of the things that I do like about filmmaking is that you find out how to solve new problems.

Once you have a situation that is fresh, then you sort of believe in it and it becomes normal. So you do end up with protagonists that haven't been in other movies before.

Don't ever let the viewer settle in and get ahead of you.

Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon. Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.

It's time to restore the bonds of trust between citizens. Let us give thanks for all that we have and let us boldly face the exciting new frontiers that lie ahead.

One must have all the virtues to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery? Shall I covet my neighbor's maid? All that would go ill with good sleep.

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Jesus but people got weird when they lived alone.

I don't think about success to be famous, because I've done that at the highest level, but it's all about my children.

One of the things people don't really recognise about the similarities between country and hip-hop is that they're celebrations of pride in a lifestyle.

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.