I've been asked several times over the years to become president, and I've always said no, because I didn't want to give up all the time from my work. The position won't be open for another year, but if they still want me then, I'll do it; I'll speak out as often as I can from that platform.

I know the pleasure you get from making your films. The intense involvement in every aspect: the acting, the camera, the colors, the costumes, even the hair and makeup. Editing is thrilling. Everything to do with films is absorbing - everything but the money part, the business. But I'm deeply glad I've had that experience.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

If the world weren't such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics