I felt, "Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama." Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

I feel like Alain Delon, who once said, "It doesn't matter that I'm not a star in America because I'm a huge star in France, I'm a legend in Spain, and I'm a god in Japan.

The collaborator has to be someone who understands that his role is to help you articulate what you want, but at the same time is not just going to be mechanically obeying, but adding to, supplementing, and coming up with stuff.

Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.

I work seriously with complete integrity. I never, never, never have offered a part to anyone who didn't deserve it, and I've never not delivered when I do offer a part. My word is better than a contract.

In a way, I think that the movie Fight Club [1999] did a weird, negative thing to boxing, culturally. I mean, it is sort of similar to what has happened to the novel. For however many good novels are written, the novel itself has completely lost its place.