Mr Wilder & Me

Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them

My daughter was right: young people do not notice the feelings of their parents, are not even aware that they have feelings, most of the time. They live in a blissful state of sociopathy, as far as their parents' emotions are concerned

In circumstances this desperate there is only one thing that can console me. I always keep at least three different kinds of Brie in the kitchen for emergency situations.

As you get older, the hopes get smaller and the regrets get bigger. The challenge is to fight it. To stop the regrets from taking over

There was the outside world, the world of politics and history, and there was my inside world, the world of music and family, and the two worlds never met. In the outside world there was economic stagnation and military rule and political censorship and people being tortured and sent away to concentration camps; in my inside world there was music and laughter, there were home comforts and good food and the warm glow of the unconditional love my parents felt for each other and for me. I lived in a little bubble of happiness and paid hardly any attention to what was going on around me.

Here I sat down and closed my eyes, tilting my face towards the sun and listening to the gentle lap of the blue water against the rocks. Perhaps it was my destiny, after all, to be always alone: that was the tragic, self-dramatizing thought that came to me, and in some paradoxical way it also brought me a kind of comfort, reconciling me to what seemed, at that moment, to be my essential nature: introverted, melancholy and solitary.

Billy might have known it for several months by now, and I might only just have begun to grasp it, but we had both come to the same realization: the realization that what we had to give, nobody really wanted any more

Mi hija tenía razón: la gente joven no se fija en los sentimientos de sus padres, ni siquiera es consciente de ellos la mayor parte del tiempo. Viven en un bendito estado de sociopatía en lo que respecta a las emociones de sus padres.

The phallic symbolism of his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, is obvious. Lindbergh, in effect, is trapped inside an enormous penis which carries him onwards to an inevitable destination which cannot be changed. Is this how you feel as a director, trapped inside your own masculinity?

My poverty was always a source of disappointment to her. If only she could have waited a few years

The gods would be moving on, in other words; and I, a mere mortal, would be left behind, forgotten