“I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?”

“There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.”

“Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.”

“And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the ‘personality’ doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it.”

“Lots of people think things would be better some other way. That's why the world's lousy with theme parks.”

“Even though there are really no original themes or stories to tell, it's more about the way you tell the story.”