People who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all.

English is much drier. You can get away with a lot less. Pathos, lyricism, these are things you have to tone down if you want the English version of the book to work.

I wanted to write a book that would leave open many riddles and mysteries, even to me. Of course in some cases I do know the answers, but in many others I don't know and don't want to know.

A neglect of one's sentimental education early in life could bear the most unfortunate fruit.

When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.

Also, whenever you have direct speech, and I don't quite know why, but it always gets better in English. Dialogue, the flow of dialogue, English just has a better way with it.

Exactly as we might ask God, and do ask God, to change our fate. The difference is that in the story the writer actually replies and in the end even changes his mind.

Nobody, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.

I wasn’t anything special as a father. But I loved them and they knew it.

There are no flowers in the Moon

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

I'll have you know that I am not a failed Third Division footballer. I am a failed Second Division footballer.

The Sound of battle fell upon my ear & heart all day yesterday - even after dark the cannon's insatiate roar continued.

If the gospel be not preached, Jesus Christ is, as it were, buried.

Every film starts with two or three images. Then I try to edit these images.

I think when you think of my films, I think hopefully you think of an extreme sort of real unfolding, real-time, performed, feeling semi-improvised, you know what I mean, all that.

We do not homeschool to avoid wicked people. We homeschool so we wicked people can talk all day about the one Man who wasn’t wicked.

A person who follows the dharma is unpredictable because the dharma is unpredictable.