For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

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

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

I have to come out of the closet of the third person and speak in a more direct way.

The feminist movement has been important to me because it's made me feel less odd and also because it has made me understand some of the pressures on women which I was lucky enough to have escaped, perhaps because of my eccentricity or the oddness of my upbringing.