We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal. We're not so far away from the gorillas and the apes, those beautiful creatures.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

I know there are supposedly happy people in this world. I never believed it, but I take it for granted. God knows, they're all on television.

I don't want to lose hope.

I thought that if I were going into old age I would want to do what [Giuseppe] Verdi did, which is to write extraordinary things, and to really find myself.

I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?

I'm totally crazy, I know that.