Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

I'm not trying to be a celebrity, Justin Timberlake kinda guy.

Yes, there were gas chambers. Millions of Jews died. There is no question. I don't know the figures. I'm not an expert on the Holocaust.

That's the happiest moment. When it's all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.

My role as a producer is very specific. It's maintaining the creative truthfulness, day in and day out.

Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.

A cunning woman is her own mistress because she confides in no one. She who deceives others anticipates deceit, and guards herself.

I am convinced that there are more threats to American liberty within the 10-mile radius of my office on Capitol Hill than there are on the rest of the globe.

In the case of Wilderpeople, I walked on the first day with some apprehension actually; because it doesn't come anywhere close to anything I've really played before, this part.