All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

Try not to live in a linguistic slum.

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.