I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.
Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are different from one another, but we are so alike.
Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
With death comes honesty.
It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.
After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.
Free speech is life itself.
For a fellow who’s not to much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion.
You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you’re lucky you finish at the smart end.
As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right.
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
That’s the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it’s real.
The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.