I'm just upset that we've been distracted by so much noise and vulgarity when we could be trying to talk about how our country can get stronger.

'Star Wars' hasn't changed my life at all.

I think the press is doing a wonderful job of putting the pressure on the decision-makers in Hollywood to support more female directors.

I think losing a child is unimaginable. It's every person's worst nightmare. It's unimaginably difficult. It shakes your faith in the world. It tests your optimism.

I think the New York Public Library is so, so amazing. It's literally the coolest place - It's good shelter from the sun and it's the most beautiful building. It's really, really fun.

I don't think I've ever been in love, I'm sure I will be some day. I've had enormous crushes, although I've never been into the Brad Pitt thing.

I just stay away from the news and try and find people around me who are doing positive things and look to them.

Your relationship with your husband should be an important part of your private life, but publicly you should be able to define yourself.

Girls have girl/guy relationships because we are expected to be so emotional and sensitive and stuff, and sometimes you just don't feel like being that way.

It's a big honour to have people be excited about a movie that you make. That's the one thing that you want.

...Father made a fetish out of performing tasks the correct way. There was an efficiency and economy of his motions that I always found a pleasure to watch and a pain to mimic.

I was born in the age of "alas".

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

I've always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

I lit a cigarette and began puffing on it as I drank one quick beer after another. I was neither a drinker nor a smoker nor a fighter, but I had planned to be all three on this day.

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies. I had to start over again. I knew that. And I had to begin by ceasing to loathe myself for my difference from the rest.

Take the local, take the express, don't get off till you reach success -- Sidney Rosen (Prince Of Tides)

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.