I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies.

There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

Any good movie is filled with secrets.

There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

The unconscious is our best collaborator.

Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.

I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

I came to love silence, because it's so rare, and it's now my favorite aural condition.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

Alcohol kills slowly. Good, I'm in no hurry.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

The Sun in London ran a front page declaring my bum a national treasure. I really did laugh at that. Its not like it can actually do anything, except wiggle.

Out of routine comes inspiration.

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool opotamus?

Smoking cigarettes seems to alarm peace activists much more than voting for Reagan does.

Love and pain become one and the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.