“Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence, which is brutal, agonizing and meaningless with some oases, delight, some charm and peace. Life is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…
“I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of [one of my films]. We all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through.
“Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.”
No link or hint is being provided to identify the speaker. I’ve pruned some of it down to make it sound less repetitious, but you’re supposed to know who this person is without even thinking about it.