To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.