"The ability to row in any conditions, raging crosswind, two-foot tall jet ski wakes, torrential downpour, is absolutely essential in order to be a champion sculler. It all comes under the heading of boatmanship. Some races are won on nothing more than superior boatmanship."

“I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.”

“Like Yoga, the spiritual life is actually very difficult.”

“My family’s said to me from the beginning, ‘People are always going to tell you to pick what you want to be when you grow up. You take that and throw it out the window, that’s garbage. People are complicated and we love many things and we’re passionate about many things. You can be a human rights activist and also be doing these comedy plays in your community and that’s OK. All those things are a part of who you are and you can love them equally.”

“All of a sudden you have this feeling of clarity. Backcountry snowboarding has really done a lot to boost that feeling in me.”

“Every wanton and causeless restraint of the will of the subject, whether practiced by a monarch, a nobility, or a popular assembly, is a degree of tyranny.”

Source : Sir William Blackstone, John Fletcher Hargrave, George Sweet, Sir Richard Couch, William Newland Welsby (1852). “Commentaries on the Laws of England : in Four Books, with an Analysis of the Work”, p.126

“Once I started on 'Frances' I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life.”

“Trying is failing with honor”

“I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.”