Each actor is a very different person, and each one has to be directed very differently.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

I think décor says a lot about someone's social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

A dead love never dies.

All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres.

A great leader often sacrifices greatly in the service of others.

She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?

When any fit of gloominess or perversion of mind lays hold upon you make it a rule not to publish it by complaints.

I always say to my students, if you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

You hear about the struggles with substances and all that, but [Phil Wood] was a really a great guy. This was a great man.

When disaster waves, I try not to wave back.

You must exercise your caution in laying your plans, but be bold in carrying them out.

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.