Follow your own star!
It is guaranteed to put all teeth on edge, including George Washington's, wherever they might be.
Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.
Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital.
Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.
In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.
The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was. Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems…Its insights are fairly lame at this point.
A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.
We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.
When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.
I'm not a deeply religious person and I don't really know if there's a God or not and I don't really even care, but something out there has got to control something. Because people can put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger and live and someone else can slip on the curb and die.