“This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.”

I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.

Negativity is the enemy of creativity.

There’s always fear of the unknown where there’s mystery.

Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you’re afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.

Individual peace is the unit of world peace.

Don’t make a film if it can’t be the film you want to make. It’s a joke, and a sick joke, and it’ll kill you.

It’s so freeing, it’s beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Intuition is knowingness, and this field of unbounded knowing, of knowingness, is within every human being. You start tapping into that and it becomes an ocean of solutions.

The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.

We’re all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what’s going on, so it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that people are thinking.

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is.

A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

Starve a heart long enough and it will learn to feed on its own love.

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

Men wear hearts on the sleeves that boys wipe their noses on.

Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind. You will find him through the strength of your hearts.

You can’t give your heart to a wild thing.

He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other different desires.