Literature Interviews

“I’m 80 years old now, and little by little over your lifetime you begin to understand things that you didn’t understand earlier.”

“There’s only one of you in the world. No one else is like you and that's a superpower.”

“Most people make art and movies as a job and if a lot of people go to see it they make money and that is their sign of success. I am not making judgment here, but their goal is strictly business-oriented. I don't do this as a business.”

“You can’t measure something like who is the best chef in the world. Whether I’m the best or not, no one can really say. However, my restaurant elBulli was certainly the most influential restaurant in the world.”

“I’ve learned not to look at sales reports. I used to, but if I had listened to sales reports at the beginning, I would have given up on things that are some of our biggest successes now.”

“The first song that I wrote was the way of discovering if I could write a song. And after that one I knew that I understood the form. Everything after that became more personal.”

“I’m surviving. I do everything I can to speak out and make sure that I keep my humanity.”

“I try to look at things more from the perspective that everything is happening for us, not to us. And so whatever challenges that were occurring at the time, perhaps they were happening just so this moment could happen.”

“Over the course of my life, I have sacrificed love, private life, and time for me, all on the altar of work. But I have also created an empire that is important for so many.”

“I am very grateful for the films I’ve made. I’ve been able to make movies for $1 million and I’ve been able to make movies for $195 million. I can do what I want in different sizes for different reasons. I have been able to do 10 more movies than I thought I would ever make!”

“I am Valentino. I live in my own world. I love to create clothes, I love beautiful things. If they want to call me an icon, okay, then I am an icon.”

“It’s everything you need, but nothing extra. It’s what's essential. It’s a minimum state which you achieve when you can't add or subtract… It’s sort of this perfect state, that’s what I'm looking for.”

“Happiness for me is just being; just being at any given moment. If you are searching for happiness, you are not happy. It’s the pot at the end of the rainbow.”

“I dreamed of winning the Olympics since I was nine years old. That was definitely the most memorable race of my career. But the next day I woke up, and I wanted to win the next race.”

“One day, if you have a little bit of talent and a lot of hard work, you’re going to find out who you are.”

“If I want to make a movie and I can at 62, I will. But I want to leave the ring triumphant. I want this guy, this guy you see right now, I want him to be the guy who makes the movies, not the autumn dude.”

“To fight this game alone is actually every day a struggle. Sometimes you are not in the best shape. The biggest thing is that you must find in it a personal happiness.”

“For the first 20 years in my career all I did was add things; more courses, more silverware, more ingredients, adding, adding, adding. Only like three years ago or so I was able to really start focusing on removing and felt confident to do so. I finally created a dish where for the first time I felt like I achieved what I tried to do for 23 years.”

“During my career I was blessed to be able to constantly be motivated and constantly be pushing myself, because otherwise I never would have achieved what I did.”

“In the moment when you’re designing a building, it’s the subject. One year later, when you just go back and see it, it’s the object. It becomes part of the city. It starts to sit where it should be sitting.”

“It's important for a novelist to use the imagination like a musician, a composer or a painter would, in a kind of non-logical way. I think it’s very important for me to not just become a kind of intellectual writer.”

“The journey is everything! It’s a cliché, but I have really felt it in my own life, in the 25 or 30 years I’ve been in this… The goal is the process, really enjoying the process.”

“I started a very nice career, became quite successful, and at age 40 I won this prize. But when I got that prize, I realized that I hadn’t yet found my own language of cooking. So I got on my knees and gathered all the tools from my childhood and started working very hard on that. And that’s how it started.”

“The bottom line in the end is to grab the heart of the audience and talk to them directly and tell them: "I share with you my soul and my heart."”

“As a director, what I hope is to create situations where the actors will be able to be alive like real people even in the context of something that is quite manufactured.”

“I feel like the best art comes from a sense of necessity and urgency, like I can't help but talk about this.”

“You better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die.”

“I live from my heart. I am not a cerebral person. I will never be. I am 55 years old. I will continue doing things the way I have done them my whole life.”

“People have said that before, “Oh, I'll read a recipe and know it's yours before I see your name on it.” That's the best compliment because I feel like working with food is such an extension of my personality.”

“You can catch ideas at a deeper level when you start meditating. Intuition grows, and intuition is the number one tool for an artist – feeling and thinking combined. The ideas are flowing, and the feeling that you can get it to feel correct. You know what that is. It’s a knowingness that grows. It’s really beautiful.”

“I hope the scale of my works is way bigger than what you see. I hope they live in you.”

“When I swing and miss with a movie or a play, it’s life or death for me. I feel I don’t have any value, that there is no reason someone would want to be friends with me, that kind of thing… I think that is something that’s not going to change, so I try to use it as motivation.”

“What I am looking for in this world is a sense of not feeling alone, and that’s one of the greatest gifts you can give to another person. I hope that my work does that. I hope that when people leave the theater they feel less alone.”

“I consider myself a storyteller. I feel that is what good directors do, they are really just following criteria: is this a good story? Is this the story I want to tell? All we’re trying to do is the hard task of making interesting, thought-provoking films.”

“The success of translating an idea into action is very often where the talent is to be found. If you can give a body to the idea, I think you are onto a very interesting process.”

“I struggled a lot. That was the reason I became a champion. A lot of people give up, a lot of people feel sorry for themselves. But I didn't.”

“I’ve learned that with time also comes pleasure: the pleasure of creating but also upholding the legacy that’s been passed down to me.”

“The thing I’ve gathered more of over the years is a self-confidence that’s to do with having done work that people have liked.”

“I think the mark of a great song, photo or a painting is something you can remember. It’s kind of that simple. If you work at it, there will be times when the intangible becomes tangible and for a moment… You are a wizard.”

“Somehow at the end of the day doing something that actually resonates with people is quite rewarding and keeps me going.”