Most filmmakers' entire body of knowledge is of other movies. When they describe things, they describe them in relation to other movies. That's why we have so many cyclical movies that look like other movies. But I'm not cynical. I even go to some of those movies.

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind - until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in.

My dear, try to believe we exist when you aren't there. We're independent of you. None of us is like you fancy we are. Perhaps it wouldn't matter much if your thoughts were not so dark, always so dark.

People don't believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.

We do not know why we think of them. We do not know why, when we think of them, we feel of a sudden that the earth is good and that it is not a burden to live.

When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.

Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn.

You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you *do* that makes you who you are.

What we believe about ourselves and our purpose has a powerful impact on how we live, how we love, and what we learn.

A serious problem with reactive language is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People become reinforced in the paradigm that they are determined, and they produce evidence to support the belief. They feel increasingly victimized and out of control, not in charge of their life or their destiny. They blame outside forces—other people, circumstances, even the stars—for their own situation.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ARISTOTLE Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. "Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny," the maxim goes.