Everyone in my family is in the film business; I knew I wanted to be creative and it was important in my family to be artistic.

When you direct is the only time you get to have the world exactly how you want it. My movies are very close to what I set out to do. And I'm super-opinionated about what I do and don't like.

I'm always a sucker for a love story.

The unexpected connections we make might not last, yet stay with us forever

My movies are not about being, but becoming.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

It seems that the greatest difficulty is to find the end. Don't try to find it, it's there already.

You don't have to be loud. If you know what you want, people respect that.

Forget the audience, make what you want to see

Thats the way I work: I try to imagine what I would like to see.

I like telling the story in a visual way. I don't like explaining a lot in dialogue.

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

In failure, you begin to lose friends. In success, you lose most of them.

If I hadn't worked up the courage to talk to Christy, she most likely would have been a pretty face that disappeared back into the crowd.

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.

The Abrahamic God is a disease masquerading as its own remedy which we desperately need to cure.

I wasn't a kid growing up thinking, 'One day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech.' That wasn't on my mind.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

I may be a mistake maker, but I'm also a mistake breaker.

Peace is more than just absence of war. It is rather a state in which no people of any country, in fact no group of people of any kind live in fear or in need.

Americans need to worry about whether Trump will be watching out for America's bottom line or his own bottom line.