existential themes Quotes

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.

Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

Human life is a combination of tragedy and comedy. The shapes and designs that surround us are the music accompanying this tragedy and this comedy.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

In reality, we are all travelers - even explorers of mortality.

I believe the biggest themes of life are put into the best focus when held up against the very sharp light of mortality.

The desire to survive and the fear of death are artistic sentiments

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.

Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension

Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death.

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Art is always to a large extent about need, despair and hopelessness.

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death

I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.

The man without a navel still lives in me.