I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

I hate wasting people's time.

If people take an interest in you and they think there's half a chance, they might hang on. It's dreadful.

I made the film in spite of Harvey, not because of Harvey.

I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else.

When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.

My curiosity sustains me for the period of the shoot.

There must've been some part of me that wanted to make my mark. But there was never a defining moment.

Many years ago, I really didn't know where the next work was coming from.

At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do.

I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk.

The whole thing of weight, I guess it's because there is a wider fascination we all have with weight.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

I think some actors thrive on working at a much greater pace than I do.

I feel less often compelled to do the work than I was in the past.

I find it easier to work when it's quiet.

The last time I was on a small set would've been probably My Left Foot.

I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing.

I see a lot of movies. I love films as a spectator, and that's never obscured by the part of me that does the work myself. I just love going to the movies.

Making a film, setting it up and getting it cast and getting it together, is not an easy thing.

There's nothing worse than finding yourself in a situation, a very demanding piece of work, and knowing that you're not a true ally to the person who's in charge of all that.

You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

How people are around a director, it really does affect everything, every detail of the life of the movie.

I'm very often still very much alive for that other being and that other world long after the film is finished.

I suppose the place where I live is fairly remote, it would seem remote to some people.

I would wish for any one of my colleagues to have the experience of working with Martin Scorsese once in their lifetime.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.