I had a very turbulent and painful childhood, like many people. I left for college when I was 16 years old and up until that point I'd lived in five different family configurations. Each one ended or changed through a death or some terrible loss.
I knew Marilyn over a two-year period. I met her first on a movie called 'Let's Make Love.' I photographed her at that time on and off through the time of her death. I was 22 years old and she was 34 or 35.
I always believed 'The Fly' to be a classic opera story. It's a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice.
At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.
Even one heatstroke death is one too many because every death caused by leaving a child unattended in a hot car is 100 percent avoidable.
Those men who, in war, seek to preserve their lives at any rate commonly die with shame and ignominy, while those who look upon death as common to all, and unavoidable, and are only solicitous to die with honour, oftener arrive at old age and, while they live, live happier.
If the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is to live, our babies must live. Our mothers must choose life. If we refuse to answer the cry of mercy from the unborn, and ignore the suffering of the mothers, then we are signing our own death warrants.
A lot of the stuff that's happening now, I can trace back to 'Death of a Salesman.' Francine Maisler, the casting director, saw 'Death of a Salesman' and called me in for 'Unbroken.' The casting director of 'Normal Heart' had seen 'Salesman' too. I look back on it now, and it's like one thing led to another; it was a chain reaction.
A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.
My mother had various jobs, from where she was regularly fired as politically undesirable. I often saw her crying and mumbling that we'll starve to death.
There's no dignity in hiding from an undignified story. You don't want to die the death of 1000 cuts. Just get the whole thing out… the entire thing, every detail, answer the questions and move on.
Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
Because war is a competition involving life and death, and in which national security and vital interests are at stake, establishing an objective other than winning is not only counterproductive, but also irresponsible and wasteful. In some circumstances, it is also unethical.
Which death is preferably to every other? 'The unexpected'.
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.
Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns.