“In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.”

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don’t express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It’s a form of aggression.

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end; life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end in the middle, and it should be all there.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

One must always try to see the truth of a situation – it makes things universal.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling.

Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

Kindly words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness.

I like the term ‘misunderstood.’ But I am a bit of a bad boy.

in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.

Whatever the job you are asked to do at whatever level, do a good job because your reputation is your resume.

I ain’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug. I don’t want anybody to kind of look at me like that.

Alan Smith… very much a striker, by reputation… and by fact.

in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.