I did not have a reputation to defend.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve as revenge, to show that I could.

You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.

The whole showmanship is NOT to answer every question.

Happy endings make me puke.

Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling.

The best films are because of nobody but the director.

I don't rehash the past. It's my baggage. That's all. I accept things as they are.

I never made a film which fully satisfied me.

I simply think there's life after movies. I have to adhere to this philosophy, and therefore I like other things, and I have other passions. None are as big as movie-making, but they exist.

The crux of our conflict lay in the fact that we each couldn't be who we wanted the other to be.

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.

A wise man should marry a virgin of a respectable family even if she is deformed. He should not marry one of a low-class family, through beauty. Marriage in a family of equal status is preferable.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

When you look for independence and you get what you want, how come you look back thinking what have I done?

See your reality as a life that has many tracks or potentials that you call "the future."

For any alliance to work, the focus must remain on solving specific problems.

A person's true wealth is the good he or she does in the world.

The ability to bounce back after a setback is the single most important trait an entrepreneurial venture can possess.

Only pissed-off people change the world.