Start. Don’t look back. If at the end it doesn’t meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.

I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.

A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.

Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.