I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all. I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job.

Sleepless' was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

The glories of our blood and state, Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate, Death lays his icy hand on kings. Scepter and crown must tumble down, And, in the dust, be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.