“I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”

“I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness-...”

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could ...”

“The dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models -- that we might not need animals in the flesh.”

“Women think in [Douglas] Sirks films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk the...”

“The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”

“Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.”

“Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,”

“What, more realistically, is this mutation, the new man? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogues dream; the free-thinker ...”