“Today in Germany, everyone is being watched–even the watchers.”

Do you know what it’s like to love and be alone?

I want to be a fighter. So fight for something! Not for money.

It’s an idea you have of yourself, like the idea you have of your own personality which finds its best representation in the world in terms of specific flows of imaginary images. That’s what directing is.

But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking.

I’ll kill you with my own hands rather than let you put the mark of Cain on my brother!

Money has no moral opinions.

I don’t take no dive for nobody. Whaddya think I am, a tanker!

D’you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?

This is Wall Street, and today is important. Because tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million dollars–an excitingday in a man’s life. The enterprise was slightly illegal.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that’s all finished up.

A man could spend the rest of his life trying to remember what he shouldn’t have said.

Don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?

What are you gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal.

What do you mean “gangsters”? It’s business.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that’s all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there’s nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.

Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it… that’s excellence.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton… it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians – by America in general.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.