What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

Obviously, in dealing with a relationship, sexuality has to be involved, and jealousy and emotions like that. And I don't know, I've always been intrigued by those emotions.

And I think you understand a little bit more why she falls for him. In a way, watching the French do anything is a little more fun because their gestures are different. And in that way, they make everything interesting.

The challenge, really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few moments that aren't cliche.

If you are prepared to make a fool of yourself for them then you usually get that back. I think that there are points where you become so close to an actor, you know them so well, almost as well or better than their spouse. You have to know them, warts and all.

I was speaking to Ridley Scott the other day and he makes a film every 18 months. He's amazing really.

I don't know really. I've always been interested in the small picture instead of the big one, and I've always been interested in relationship pictures.

Their every instinct - and I have to say this is without exception - is to iron out the bumps, and It's always the bumps that are the most interesting stuff.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

I was watching Monster's Ball, which is a fabulous movie. It's just a little gem: beautifully shot, and shot in a way I never would have done. It made me feel very old, really, because it wasn't eccentric for its own sake, it was just very original.

Foxes was a movie that didn't do a lot of business but it didn't do too badly critically and eventually they offered me other things. The interesting thing was that next I tried a film called Star Man, which Michael Douglas was producing.

I've always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors. Where you can be in their shoes and therefore be more involved if they're people that you recognize.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

Well, I think just the fact that you are making your first film is a huge step.

So on my screenplay, on the left-hand side of the page, I will put all the ideas that refer to the scene next to it so I have some sort of pictorial reference.

I think you get better at staring into space. Especially living in the South of France.

Every time I do one I feel like I've never really quite learned anything. I always find that when I'm making a film, I find it a little bit like I'm doing it for the first time.

What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

The danger is that if you have a bunch of ideas that you forget to use.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

Let's have some new cliches.

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

I think to be oversensitive about cliches is like being oversensitive about table manners.

I would rather read a poorly structured story that has fresh ideas than a tightly structured one with cliches.

The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

Most of my cliches aren't original.

We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

You need cliches. Cliches are what people respond to.

I'm one of the cliches that has grown up.

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Cliches are what make you understand something.

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them.

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Unfortunately, all the cliches we see about Hollywood are true.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

All the child-star cliches, I've tried very hard to avoid them all.