No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.
Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.
Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.
I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.
Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.
I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.
Incidentally, I only have one cavity, and as much as my dentist asks me to, I just can't bring myself to floss.
But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. “Fight in the way of God those who fight you,” the Quran says, “but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor” (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: “Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed. . . who have been driven from their homes for saying, 'God is our Lord' ” (22:39; emphasis added).
You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?