I made it about a three-day weekend so people wouldn't have to change their clothes a lot. We didn't have an art department; we didn't have a make-up department.

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.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

Close your eyes and you will see your dreams, open them and you will see obstacles.

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.

We actors don't travel as tourists with a camera, we really get to enter the life of a place and get to know it.

I may be a killer," Jace said, "but I know what I am. Can you say the same?

It is more easy to forgive the weak who have injured us than the powerful whom we have injured.

How has retirement affected my golf game? A lot more people beat me now.

its difficult to dislike a man who takes pleasure in giving away free beer.

They judge me like a picture book, by the colors, like they forgot to read.

Anything in life worth working for, is worth praying for.