“It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.”

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

So if I believe in God, and I do, it’s because I think I’m God.

Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.

Is there a movie I think I should have won the Oscar for? Yeah. All of them.

You will be the beautiful prince you were always meant to be.

Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.