The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

obsession either boosts up feeling orjust blow it off . . .

Graduation speeches force you to reflect. They are about consciousness. Nothing is better than consciousness.

An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.

The blue collar milieu was something that I really understood and resonated with me and I thought was underrepresented in American cinema.

On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.

I think humans are driven by othering people, by defining themselves by who they are not and who is different from them. Human beings are in love with othering.

The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

I don't accept flowers. I take nothing perishable.

Prayer is simple, prayer is supernatural, and to anyone not related to our Lord Jesus Christ, prayer is apt to look stupid.

I once took on the role of the Batman for a commercial about equal pay for women.