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

A sense of humour is common sense dancing.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.