Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States . . .

Happiness is a perception—not a possession.

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point.

In very truth the days are almost free, and if it is another way of saying that our lives are empty, well -- there are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating . . .

The John Ford pictures I made are highly regarded, but at the time they didn't seem like that.

Collaborative is my favorite word in moviemaking.

We fail, not because of big problems, but because of small purposes.

She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.

I am a huge fan of proselytizing. I am a huge fan of speaking your mind. The only way we can share the universe... is by talking very strongly about what we believe.