From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Working class life has been important to me; it's not a question of pity or disaster- but of enjoying the comedy, warmth and generosity of spirit that you find there – alongside the use of language, dialects, and the stories of childhood and old-age.
There is no such thing as History with a capital H. There are histories, multiple stories waiting to be told, researched, understood and appreciated. The story changes depending on who tells it.
We [older generations] want to sit down with people and talk about things- but young people go to a restaurant, and sit together, both with their telephones! In today's world, people have become so ambitious, everything has to be quick, and everyone wants more… there is so much greed. Have, have, have. Everything has to be quick.
Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right. We're confident that if we have children, they will live long lives as well and we've never had those trends before in all human history.
In the case of Brazil, one of the most important things is the huge ethnic and cultural mixture which makes us a country with dynamism, vibrancy, and the ability to understand the psychology of other nations. We have problems, of course, but this is one of our huge strengths, and a huge foreign policy asset.
Most people don't know who they are. They're trying to be what other people want them to be- or they're trying to create something that fills a void that comes from within. The pressure to conform is huge right now, especially with people getting cancelled; saying what you really feel can make you unpopular… so people box themselves into a place where they're not celebrated or respected for being truthful. It's tragic.
We are a society of consumers not investors. In my generation… the baby-boomers… we have believed that success is defined by materialism.
Without the extreme magnifying glass that was on my life, I don't know if I would have stumbled on any of the discoveries I've made.
What politics couldn't say and left silent, fiction could tell. Literature takes us out of our comfort zones and pushes us to see the issues from various angles. Fiction is an intellectual exercise.
We tend to go deeper with that in terms of specific facial expressions, body language, and vocal tone. And I think what's important to know there is that we often make a lot of mistakes when we're reading other people's emotions because we bring in our own cultural values, our own belief systems, and we oftentimes project emotions onto people as opposed to really knowing how they're feeling.
Film is a reflection of society, both present and past.
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.