“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of whe...”

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose its an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening child...”

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”

“The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”

“What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that its a matter of som...”

“What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is t...”

“To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that weve hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place.”

“We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of ...”

“Da used to say that lies were easy, but trust was hard. Trust is like faith: it can turn people into believers, but every time it's lost, trust becomes harder and harder to win back.”

“Faith is a luxury for those who are able to ignore what the rest of us must see every day. Pessimism, distrust, and irony are the holy trinity of my religion, irony in particular.”

“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”