A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.

Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it.

The Sundance Institute has been vital to the film communities of Latin America.

No, I worked a lot for European television, doing documentaries in Brazil.

Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa.

The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.

I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

So the search for a father in Central Station is also a search for a country.

So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil.

It was a complex endeavor so without Robert Redford's constant support we wouldn't have gotten to the end.

The Peruvian faces are completely different from that faces in Argentina and in Brazil.

And my generation in Brazil was influenced by Cinema Novo. So we're echoing what's been done way in the past.

I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.

So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens.

On the contrary, I'm a strong believer in the necessity of imperfection coming into the film.

I come from Brazil, which is a Portuguese speaking part of the continent.

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

We all knew the book well because it's the cult book in Latin America. For me, this was a sacred territory. I would not have ventured into it by myself.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture.

The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.

There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.

When I come to London, I always like to see what's playing at the NFT.

But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

I get so tired of people saying, 'Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that', and I'm like, 'Well no, fantasy is reality', that's what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.

Hopefully you marry someone who you not only love, but who you like as well.

If you don't want to have to kill or capture every bad guy in the country, you have to reintegrate those who are willing to be reconciled and become part of the solution instead of a continued part of the problem.

We went to Detroit. I wanted to see what was going on in some other parts of the world. You know, I was just traveling, like. I had a minister that lived here. He was in St. Louis and he said things was going so well and that it was such a wonderful place.

I love being married. It's so great to find one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

We have been in the territories since 1967. In 2002, we had sometimes three or four suicide attacks every day. We came to the conclusion that it can't continue like that.

I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away - the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don't buy it.

On a traffic light green means go and yellow means yield but on a banana its just the opposite. Green means hold on yellow means go ahead and red means where the hell did you get that banana at.

I hate to say 'chain restaurant,' but we're sort of a corporation now. How do we defy that concept, where people assume each restaurant can't be good?

China seems unpredictable because it has a distinct culture and social system. It is still a mystery to other parts of the world even though the veil of China has been lifted many times as a result of globalization.

You don't have to follow what most players do by going to the top school. You can do anything at any school you're at, as long as you're focused and you work hard.

I want my permanent address to be in Oklahoma. Someday, when I get married and I have kids, that's where I want to raise my kids.

Schizophrenia demons live in my head.

I think you can totally be a totally normal kid from the suburbs of Chicago and go off and play shows. It's one of those things that when you go home, you're still the nerd you were when you left, and your parents still get to yell at you about cleaning up your room, and your girlfriend still drags you to the pet store.

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

Spiders - the way they move freaks me out. It's so malevolent.

Thus one memory follows another until the waves dash together over our heads, and a deep sigh swells the breast, which warns us that we have forgotten to breathe in the midst of these pure thoughts.

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

The Democratic Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.

Exercise should be regarded as tribute to the heart.

Love is indeed, at root, the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones.