All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

I'm a version of the same person.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

I'm interested in what actors reveal about themselves through the structure of the character.

I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

When you're feeling very comfortable with an actor, you are doing nothing.

I always stood for the elimination of conflict and wars, and any of those causes that ignite them.

You're meant to have whatever your heart desires. Whatever your heart wants that much is already a part of you.

American Sniper focuses on a soldier with 160 kills, or as Harvey Weinstein calls it, a slow morning.

May the saddest day of your future be no worse than the happiest day of your past.

Why is it good for football to take the excitement away from fans by overcharging them for tickets to see their team?

Atheists say no one can prove the existence of God but I say no one can disprove that God exists I see God in everything I feel his presence everywhere to me I know that he exists.

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.