A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

You cannot control what you love--you watch it driving recklessly towards the broken bridge, the torn-up track, the horror of seventy years ahead.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed-he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.