I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

While directing in theater that the actors will - I don't know if it's competitiveness or what it is, but they love to make each other laugh. They love to impress each other in rehearsal. They'll try something for a reaction. But in film, you're very often not all together in the room at the same time. You're shooting one day, somebody else is shooting the next. It's a totally different dynamic.

If you prepare, and you've got wonderful, bright people who get it, who accept and appreciate your preparation, then you don't have to explain yourself 9,000 times.

You simply can't make someone love you if they don't. You must choose someone who already loves you. If you choose someone who does not love you, this is the sort of love you must want.

There is no crime greater, or more worthy of punishment, than being strange and frightened among the strange and frightened; except assimilation to the end of becoming strange and frightened, but apart from ones own real self.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

I began coming to Paris in the 1960s when I was told audiences here liked my work. More than 20 of my plays have been produced in Paris, and several have had long runs and have returned in revivals.