Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.

France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.

The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.