A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room.
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.
Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.
Aren’t you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?
We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.
Socrates told us, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I think he’s calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.
I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear
A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.
One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?
Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.
It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.
No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.
The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there’s no audience for unusual, original pictures – because they think they’ve made one.
All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.
It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.
In thinking about ‘depressing movies,’ many people don’t realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.
If your religion doesn’t respect the rights of other religions, it is lacking something.
Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.
There’s nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
If a movie isn’t a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
The right really dominates radio, and it’s amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn’t. They want to shut other people up. They really don’t understand the First Amendment.
If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
My motto: ‘No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.’
By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.
I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.
Well, you know what, I’m 60 years old, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was on my daddy’s knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film’s defining moments.
I begin to feel like most Americans don’t understand the First Amendment, don’t understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don’t understand that it’s the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.