“Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.”

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Life itself is a quotation.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and, where appropriate, profits.

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.

There’s a lot of producers that are much more technical or gear-skilled than I am. But I have a pure idea of what I like and where I want to go and I follow that.

I have no wisdom, no skills, and no faith but I received strength, it tears the world apart. I shall break, a heavy wave, against its shores and a young wave will cover my trace.

I apologize for my terrible interview skills.

The whole year I was in LA I got into telemarketing and learned how to make money. Five years later that skill helped me make my first film.

Musically, he was like an old man in a boy’s skin.

Some of my favorite movies are action movies. You want something good to say. That comes from good writing. But writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately.