I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

Sometimes to move forward, you have to find yourself backwards.

If you want to know someone's character, give him power.

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.

Science is basically an inoculation against charlatans.

If Donald Trump is one thing, he's a disruptive force who has never met a tradition and precedent that he doesn't want to disrupt.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech.

. . . for the most part the worst instructed, and the least knowing of any of their rank, I ever went amongst.

Just to be able to release an album back in the day when I came out was very gratifying. Most people were not given the opportunity.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.