Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.
I'm extremely grateful that I discovered my passion. I love movies. I love to watch them, I love to make them.
One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie. "
In the end, the most important thing to me is that I've raised three kids. I know that'll be the most important accomplishment of my life and it is the most easily obtainable, because all you have to do is pay attention. It is hard work and most people don't realize that's the real gift they are getting in terms of goals and success and accomplishments.
All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.
You must let go of your past and embrace your future and figure out what path you're going to go down
You can be as rich, and famous, and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. That's said over and over and over, again. It's such a cliché that it hardly needs to be said, but people don't understand that it's actually true.
Every time I write a song it feels like it could be the last one I do, or it always feels like a fluke.
Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see, Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me; In exile thy bosom shall still be my home, And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.
You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.
. . . expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before thewind.