I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

I don't hold with the notion that only bad books make good movies.

[Abbas Kiarostami] is a great artist and a poet. I sometimes think that if Samuel Beckett made films, he'd make them like Kiarostami makes them.

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

Sometimes life requires more of you than you have to give & demands you plunge into the reinvention of yourself if you truly wanna live.

Life's battle don't always go to the strongest or the fastest, but sooner or later the man who wins is the man who thinks he can .

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

There is no greater grief than to find no happiness, but happiness in what is past.

The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.

Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it's getting worse.

There is no God other than life itself.

So the blues player, he ain't worried and bothered, but he's got something for the worried people.

As if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots.