One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

Your reality, isn’t restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

Normal is gross

Prayer is meant to happen everywhere. After all, Daniel prayed in the lion’s den. Jonah prayed in a fish’s stomach. Elijah prayed in the desert. And Jesus prayed on the cross.

It’s the person who likes to pat dogs to whom dogs come for pats.

But having said that, what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating.

To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

There was a time - before I made movies - when I was more forgiving, but now that I've learned as much as I have, I want to do movies that I want to see, that have their own unique flavor.