"To master the mind is to understand that gratitude turns what we have into enough."

"It is a subtle truth that to question with sincerity is the first step toward dismantling dogma — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."

"And if you look at the reality in the United States, where you have more than 40 million people below the poverty line and 42 million on food stamps, and then you look at poverty around the world, clearly the way we're running the engine of capitalism is not serving us well."

"Khomeini was not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king - a real leader."

"The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it."

"Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world."