We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

For me, there was never an end game for becoming a director.

When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

One of America's strengths has always been its openness to the new: both new ideas and new people.

I've always felt protected. That's the God's honest truth.

Every art and every faculty contemplates certain things as its principal objects.

Mac looked up with the oddest of all his odd expressions

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

In the simplest sense, the key to the performance of any traditional commercial bank ... is the profitability of the loans it makes.

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.