I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.

We need storytelling. Otherwise life just goes on and on, like the number Pi.

I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.

I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

My hometown was one of the major U.S. Air Force bases.

I think people are universal.

Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done.

Every movie I make. That’s my hideout, the place I don’t quite understand, but feel most at home.

When there is a strong woman character in a story - that always grabs me

I think great romance needs great obstacles and textures.

Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.

Parents expect only two things from their children, obedience in their childhood and respect in their adulthood.

How can I seek forgiveness for sins I haven't committed yet?

A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years yet is their strength labour and sorrow for it is soon cut off and we fly away.

It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.

You don't have to forego education to do anything. Even if you want to go to the NBA, you should read.

News-hunters have great leisure, with little thought; much petty ambition to be considered intelligent, without any other pretension than being able to communicate what they have just learned.

Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic, Venus, the white queen, the universal matrix, Down to the molecular hexagons and carbon-chains.

Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.