I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.