When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.

Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.

I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.

I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it's only the world that doesn't like the failures.

Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.

One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.

the name of the husband is one of the strongest insignia of patriarchal power

there are people all over the world who carry the mermaid inside them, that otherworldly beauty and longing and desire that made her reach for heaven when she lived in the darkness of the sea.

Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.

But I think that what you'll discover more and more as you get older is that most people aren't thinking about you at all.

Think globally, act locally, think tribally, act universally.

There are questions of real power and then there are questions of phony authority. You have to break through the phony authority to begin to fight the real questions of power.

Good economics is good politics.

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?

I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.

Life is difficult enough without Meryl Streep movies.