I always feel that there are no final victories and no final defeats. But it's true that America is in a hole right now. There are a lot of dead fish in the water.

To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'

Assumptions allow the best in life to pass you by.

I've always felt like I was on the margins. Once upon a time that's what independent used to mean.

I like to act. I work for scale. I don't have an acting agent. I'm in the book.

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if George W.Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

The hardest thing about movies is doing take 12, 13, and 14, and finding new ways to do the same lines. So the early takes are actually easier and I think there's more surprises in them.

I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.

Combinations of people, who should have nothing to say to each other. Yet, with hearts that do not recognize it.

When you accept fallibility within yourself you become more perfect.

A man who does not trust himself will never really trust anybody.

I'd put my faith in god, but I haven't met him, and I've been hurt before.

Ideally, if anything [was] any good, it would be indescribable.

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

The message of the Gita is to be found in the second chapter of the Gita where Lord Krishna speaks of the balanced state of mind, of mental equipoise.

Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin.

I don't know anything about the Appalachian mountains or cowboys and Indians or anything. I just made it up.

I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.