Being a director is almost like being another sort of character, but you're out of view.

I live in a state of hypersensitivity, and I've always had this feeling that something bad is going to happen to myself, or my wife and children. This manifests itself in different fears and visions.

I can't afford to step away from acting, but the one thing I've learnt after all these years is that I don't fit in. It's very difficult to be at the mercy of other people's whims and visions.

My fascination is not for cinema; it's for human nature and human beings because I find it quite difficult being one at times.

You walk past people in streets, or they serve you in shops, and you know nothing about the horrors they may be living with.

What's my dilemma here? Am I making entertainment or am I making art? What am I saying? At the end of the day, cinema is entertainment for millions of people, but for me it's expression.

I watched 'Rocky' and 'Raging Bull' and 'Taxi Driver' over and over again. They spoke to you, man.

People can very quickly have a very poor self-image. It doesn't take much.

The memory of Mullah Mustafa Barzani has become a crucial part of the idea of what it means to be Kurdish today.

It's always once the script's done in the first two years if it doesn't get going somehow or another, I've never had an old script that someone's made later on.

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

I'm not clumsy; just accident prone.

I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me.

I have never cared very much for personal prizes. A person does not become a freedom fighter in the hope of winning awards.

For official purposes, these children do not exist.

I enjoy going back and forth between plays and novels. It's like having a wife and a mistress. Books are the wife; plays, the mistress.

For more than two centuries, the defenders of liberty have put their lives on the line, because they have known that we cannot take our freedoms for granted.

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.