My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.

Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

If you feel like you're in control of everything, and then things aren't going well, you feel like you're failing.

Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

What they frequently want to do with a movie is, they want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. And valleys are important; the valleys make the peaks stand out.