There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.

One does not have to make Frank Capra movies to like people.

Don't do anything. Just tolerate me and let me suffer, knowing how you feel.

Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me.

The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache. This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.