“The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.”

“you are unimportant to the important!”

“The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I'm allowed.”

“...like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it,...”

“Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.”

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”