When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.

The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.

Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.

I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.

I avoid looking in the mirror.

I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.

A strike is an incipient revolution. Many large revolutions have grown out of a small strike.

I don't worry about long-term history. I won't be around to read it.

There seems to be a lot of name-calling going on, but I want to remind you what our good dad told me one time. Labels are for soup cans.

Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.

When two forces unite, their efficiency double.

When you turn professional, you become an entertainer, and like every other entertainer, you don't want to get a bad review.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

If I practice I'll really alienate people.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.