“Fun? There is no fun.”
“Put a bird cage near the window so that the bird can see the sky? It’s much better to look than not to, even if it hurts.”
“You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.”
“I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.”
“Through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing. When I had to concentrate on a person I had to become, this thing became stronger and took more of me.”
“It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away.”
“It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows.”
“People who do not see the terrible things therefore do not see the beautiful things, either.”
“I was walking through the streets of Paris. I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it-there was no difference between physical and psychological.”
“In a way, everything concerning a movie leaves me cold.”
“They think you can dump all this and be an actor. Then they say, Good job. Do you say, Good job to an earthquake?”
“Those assholes! Do you ask a car crash for another take? Do you ask a volcano for another take? Do you ask the storm for another take?”
“I didn’t think anything. I just was Aguirre. You remember yourself in the 16th Century.”
“Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.”
“The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.”
“There can be no word to express this secret. Because this secret is very simple, but it includes almost everything.”
“Don’t be sorry, OK?”
“You can call it my consciousness of using my talent like a whore uses her body: to pay the price.”
“Being conscious of all this means changing everything, like in nature; never-ending movement.”
“This is a consolation for cripples.”
“Friends and family of Paul Smith toasted him with his favorite drink — Coca-Cola — Wednesday at noon and remembered him on Facebook, exactly two years after he died in an accident at work.”
Throughout the nineties and for the first half of the past decade, there were two dominant strains of sitcom: the blue-collar/white-collar family sitcom (Roseanne, Everybody Loves Raymond, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, etc.), and the five-or-so-friends-hanging-out-in-a-city sitcom (Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, etc.). The former culminated and withered with the end of Everybody Loves Raymond–now most often reiterated ironically by The Simpsons (which was far ahead of its time in that respect) and Family Guy–while the latter still persists in a way, only disguised or retooled as the workplace sitcom (30 Rock, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Party Down), a formula which began in part with Murphy Brown and, in its current mode, with Scrubs and the British Office.