Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.