The collaborator has to be someone who understands that his role is to help you articulate what you want, but at the same time is not just going to be mechanically obeying, but adding to, supplementing, and coming up with stuff.

Most of my movies get about a third raves, a third vicious attacks, and a third in-between.

Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.

You will never convince anyone to do anything unless you believe it should be done.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

In a way, I think that the movie Fight Club [1999] did a weird, negative thing to boxing, culturally. I mean, it is sort of similar to what has happened to the novel. For however many good novels are written, the novel itself has completely lost its place.

I feel like Alain Delon, who once said, It doesn't matter that I'm not a star in America because I'm a huge star in France, I'm a legend in Spain, and I'm a god in Japan.

Much as I like getting awards in Oldenburg, Germany and Torino, it's nice to get one in America.

To have six billion people on Earth, two billion of whom are carrying around a warped view of you? That has to register.

I felt, Oh, film is a great art because I can pull in music and visual imagery, and it has its literary aspects and drama. Film was a sort of Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, as opposed to opera, which Wagner had thought would be. That's another art form that has seen its best days.

Some people get married and they remain I, some get married and become we.

I think there's a general sense that the belief structures that existed and carried civilization forward have weakened to the point where they can no longer support it. They are not powerful enough to do it anymore because there is not enough serious belief in them.

The idea that there aren't mistakes made constantly in the judicial system is too obvious even to need to mention.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.