I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.