I remember being very influenced by 'Taxi Driver', and also Tommy Lee Jones in 'Coal Miner's Daughter' a little bit.
It's dangerous to start attributing your fortunes to luck and your misfortunes to fate.
History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.
If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.
It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read.
Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I'm not being religious, I'm telling you the truth as I have experienced it. . . . And I'm not being trendy either. I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable. . . . So maybe you don't believe in angels, that's all right, they don't care. They're not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don't depend on your faith to exist. A lot of people didn't believe the earth was round either, but that didn't make it any flatter.
You can have faith in writing itself. That's where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time.
Aristotle said time is a measure of change, and this movie is about changing in time, through time, while remaining the same person. That's a philosophical paradox and a moral dilemma. But 'Casablanca' says it's possible. You can have both. That's what it means. And that's my wish for you: that you would have both.
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard.
It's tough. Gymnastics isn't basketball or football or baseball, where you can get these huge contracts and make a lot of money.
Genius, even, as it is the greatest good, is he greatest harm.