Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

Reading a fantasy book is a commitment...a commitment to adventure...a commitment to bravery. You make that commitment and you reap the benefits...of epicness.

life is too short to despise people who simply can't help what they've done.

Don't ever get to the point where you can't be taught because life is a classroom and everyone owns a pen.

Too often we forget that social and political movements don't happen overnight. They don't bring change immediately - you have to build a critical mass of understanding of the issues.

I don't want to crawl over the entrails of past disputes.

As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically.

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not.

I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.