“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.

Nothing is more real than nothing.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Her afternoon tea is a fountain of daydreams.

Dreamlining is so named because it applies timelines to what most would consider dreams.

Fear’s what puts dreams to sleep.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?

A dream deferred is a dream denied.

My cinema – the ’50s, ’60s – is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.