As a writer, you have to be willing to kill your darlings, and I'm a writer first. As a director, I've got no problem cutting the scenes.

[If] you want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you.

Well, as far as film, either you're making a film or you're making videos. Digital capture is always trying to emulate the range and look of film. I believe personally that film has more.

I like to do stuff real and practical and in camera, as much as possible. I like old school filmmaking.

To operate а tank as a crew, it's not about five individuals. It has to be one organism, composed of five people.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

You never know what you have until you put it in front of an audience. That's the truth. That's the truth of filmmaking and that's why you make movies, for an audience to, hopefully, enjoy it.

I think a good director can embrace any genre and it's the kind of thing where you always want to do something different. You always want to challenge yourself.

I'm one of those big believers that the movie comes together in the way it's supposed to be and that movies are fated to become what they become.

My mantra is "Better is better".

Any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail.

You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you’re not good enough because they can’t understand who you are.

Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite

The moving light, rejoicing in its strength, Sped from the pyre of pine, and urged its way, In golden glory, like some strange new sun.

You say you can't? Then don't do it. That's all.

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

Men reverence one another, not yet God.

I love the flexibility of saying, "Today we're making 50-foot paintings, and we're going to have to join hands and figure out how that's going to work." But in the end, it's a possibility.

There was nothing mean about his voice. In fact it was almost too nice. Like she was too dim to grasp whatever was so obvious to him. Which made her absolutely furious.

We're very physical creatures, and we worry about how we look sometimes more than our spiritual selves