As a filmmaker you have to keep asking yourself the question are we really going to impress them [audience] either by the wow factor, the intelligence factor, the I didn't see that coming factor?

The amount of piracy is extraordinary. People don't realize how big it is.

I think when you're doing something cutting edge like 'The Matrix,' it might mean when everybody's saying 'no' that you're really on the right track.

I don't like the term 'ensemble.' It's bland to me.

One of the things that's driving films in a particular direction is that the after market value of them is dropping really fast and in many segments of it, not just DVDs. Pay television is dropping.

Everybody has a background. Everybody has a past. Not everybody's the same person all the way through.

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

What I can't figure out is why we're not making more R-rated movies, actually.

My experience is that you can't possibly win against whatever the tidal wave is that's coming at you.

It's so hard to find a director who, when you look at their body of work, you like everything.

If the studio wants to spend money on making your movie better, let them.

The best you can offer is to be for God, the good you can do is to help fellow human beings and the result of this can be to greatness with sincerity together with integrity.

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929

Laughing like children, living like lovers, rolling like thunder, under the covers, and I guess that's why they call it the blues.

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

I was a dog on a short chain / and now there's no chain.

If you can once engage people's pride, love, pity, ambition (or whatever is their prevailing passion) on your side, you need not fear what their reason can do against you.

Enunciation, diction, all that stuff. None of that is in my personality.

I'm tired of pretending that everything's fine just so I can please everyone else.

You can't have 'yes' people around you.

Oh, pity the poor glutton Whose troubles all begin In struggling on and on to turn What's out into what's in.