Subject the material world to the higher ends by understanding it in all its relations to daily life and action.

Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

After the reunification, there was a certain sense of foreignness because daily life in the former East German states was completely turned inside out - everything from the shops to the bureaucracy to the working world.

To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.

September 11 impressed upon us that life is a precious gift. Every life has a purpose. And I think we all have a duty to devote at least a small portion of our daily lives to ensuring that neither America nor the world ever forgets September 11.

Washington, D.C., is not a subtle city. Unlike the capitals of other once-great powers which, many hundreds of years old, present a more seamless meshing of monumental memory and daily life, D.C. is constructed to shout, 'Here I am! I am powerful!' to the world.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

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