What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

You will never be who you want to be, until you are happy with who you are.

Effectiveness in life is a measure of how many products you are able to produce in life

The best way to become poor is to give nothing.

If a problem can be solved by writing a check, it's not a problem, it's an expense.

A lot of my films have dealt with the dark side of technology and stress that you have to examine the ramifications of progress.

You think that enlightenment is something other than what is happening right now. This is your primary mistake.

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.

I'm as American as apple pie.

I get inspiration from movies, from fashion, then completely random things you'd never think of.

Charlie, you’re one of the most gifted people I’ve ever known. And I don’t mean in terms of my other students. I mean in terms of anyone I’ve ever met.