I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I'd like to quit thinking of the present as some minor insignificant preamble to something else.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything.

I think maybe making films is something innate you can't really teach to begin with.

The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure, while always arriving.

The rules of parenting have changed. By the modern definition, we were a generation of neglected children.

Luck is predictable; the harder you work, the luckier you get.

The five excellences include: calligraphy, painting, poetry, medicine, and t'ai chi chuan.

Leadership is tested not by one's capacity to survive politically but by the ability to make tough decisions in trying times.

Pictures can live in one's memory. That's why they are important.

I believe we are the only sentient beings in the universe, and I believe that 500 years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around.

When something irritates me, I don't go home and write; I just don't do that.

I think that a lot of times, I trust people I shouldn't, and it turns out right, and it makes me feel a little better about it.

Life without enquiry is not worth living for a man.

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.

O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness.