I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'.

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.

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.

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.

Chin up princess or the crown slips

What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.

I’m a holiday Christian at best and I’d never given much thought to demons. They were an adult version of the boogieman hiding in every kid’s closet.

It is a pity that many Christians have the TV schedule better memorized than a single chapter for God's precious Word.

Cheaters are people who have a lot of stuff to work out, and they're working it out on your time and with your heart.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

I've got an L3 bulging disk and degenerating disk. It's bulging in two places. Yeah, it's not good.

It was tremendously exciting to discover that science was not destroying religion, as people popularly believe, but that it could cast light on theism and Christianity.