 Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms. |
| To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. |
| Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison. |
| Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people. |
| Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. |
| You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. |
| It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time. |
| Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death. |
| The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick. |
| In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world. |
| It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague. |
| I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps. |
| I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with. |
| Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us. |
