And the fact that I see so many films really seems to amaze certain people.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me.

And I took a long time to appreciate Lynch.

Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it's great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.

For me, the film has to be incredibly bad to make me want to pack up and leave.

Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there's no doubt he's influenced every one of my films.

I guess I like a lot of directors. Or at least I try to.

We cannot go back to a racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic type of society.

What have you done?' he said, his voice hollow and strained. He stepped back and put his fists to his temples. 'What have you done!' With an effort, Eragon said, 'Made you understand.

I'm a very emotional person, a person of real extremes, and that's often destructive both to myself and others.

The really royal calling of the philosopher (as expressed by Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): To correct what is wrong, and strengthen the right, and raise what is holy.

I'm being driven crazy by people who are obsessed with limiting the scope of government, but feel perfectly free to demand that government get involved in women's most personal choices.

People think life is real complicated. Actually, there's nothing to it. Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.

I'm nothing. Nothing at all without writing. Without truth, my truth, the only truth I know, it's all a gambol in the pasture without rhythm or sense.

As the warm air blew in the car, simple snapshots of the life they'd lived together surfaced in his mind; but as always, those images led inexorably to their final day together.

My greatest fear is being somewhere without a book.

I write songs about what I go through.