Quote collection
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"I've never had a block. I'm talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I've had an embarrassment of riches. I'll have five ideas and I'm dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry."
"The French make two mistakes about me. They think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money."
"For some reason I'm more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good."
"I don't want to live forever through my work. I want to live forever by not dying."
"Love may be the answer, but even though you're watching for the solution, intercourse raises some rather interesting thoughts."
"That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives."
"90% of success in life is showing up"
"When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity."
"Notes for a ballet, The Spell: ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman - unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes."
"I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed."
"It's all through the actors; I cannot write in that idiom"
"I don't wanna live on in my work. I wanna live on in my apartment."
"But what if everyone in the world behaved like me and came here and shot Brisseau through the ear? What a mess! And of course we'd need valet parking."
"People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer."
"One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films."
"When I started out, I was a television writer, and we wrote a television show that was on live every week. And you didn't have the luxury of coming in and waiting to be inspired. You came in and you had to write. And you wrote, because it was going to be live on the air. So I can do that."
"Film is more of novelty, because I've done so much theater over many years. I'm in love with making movies. Also, I find it easier to remember three minutes of dialogue than three hours."
"The movie is usually, for me, something organic that grows all the time. I sit home and write it, and I'm in an isolated, four-walled environment, and I don't know what's going on. I just write it, and it's appearing in my head in some idealized way where every single moment works, and every little thing is perfect, because it's in my head."
"Usually, you hire people that you think are wonderful."
"There's no point in looking back, because there's nothing you can really do to improve the film. You can only aggravate and wish you had done stuff better."