“What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

“You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, if you just smile.”

Life and death are too resolute, too implacable to be accidental.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Whomever lives, gambles with life.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning!

What a sad business, being funny 

The deeper the truth in a creative work, the longer it will live.

Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish. 

Life can be wonderful if you're not afraid of it. All it needs is courage, imagination ... and a little dough.

“Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.” 

“would I have known that mystery leaves a space for us when certainty does not? And would I have dared to challenge rules later in life if my father had obeyed them?” 

“She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.” 

“In our weeks of talk, movies and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words: "Every day is a good day - because we are part of everything alive.” 

I live my life parallel with my work, and they are both equally important. I'm always amazed how much people talk abpeoout celebrity and fame. I don't understand the attraction.

We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere

People had always vaguely mentioned that when you have children, how part of your life would stop. But they don't say that some other extraordinary part of your life opens up.

A lot of people are frightened by old age - by being around people who are, basically, on their way out - but I'm fascinated by it. It's an amazing thing to be around someone who has had a life well lived.

I live my life parallel with my work, and they are both equally important. I'm always amazed how much people talk about celebrity and fame. I don't understand the attraction.

I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.

I think we should stop drinking bottled water. There's no need to be drinking it if you're living in western communities.

I think that's what I love about my life. There's no maniacal master plan. It's just unfolding before me.

“It's not just women in film, 18-year-old girls feel pressure to do preventative injecting. I see someone's face, someone's body who has had children and I think, they're the song lines of your experience, and why would you want to eradicate that? I look at people sort of entombing themselves and all you see is their little pin holes of terror... and you think, just live your life, death is not going to be any easier just because your face can't move.”

“Mind the gap - it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.”