“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.” 

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.” 

“More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.” 

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

“YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING

Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.

You'll live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to.

New York is my home and I have a particular fondness for it. I think it's a place where you can generate any kind of story wonderfully. But I also would be very happy to make a film in Paris or Rome.

To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

I wish I was writing something much more heavy each time I did a film, and that the comedies just occasionally come out. But unfortunately you're stuck with what you're born with.

You make a film and always hope you're going make "Citizen Kane" or "The Bicycle Thief." You make the film, and for one reason or another, one clicks and one doesn't, but it's out of your control completely.

I wish I was writing something much more heavy each time I did a film, and that the comedies just occasionally come out. But unfortunately you're stuck with what you're born with.

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about.

Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.

“YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING

“You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.” 

Do what you will while you're able, find what it is that you seek.

I wanted to be an architect, and I ended up at my job in San Francisco, and if you would have asked me then, that was one of the greatest jobs that had happened to me in terms of my career.

You cannot be in your offices every day doing nothing... and at the end of the day you expect to be paid.

Nobody can also destabilize this country. So anybody who comes to attack this country; be ready because you are going to die no matter who you are and who backed you, we will get to the bottom of this and we will not spare anybody.

“I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.” 

“I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.” 

“If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.”