I mean, look, I love movies, not just the ones I make... In fact, I don't like the movies I make very much.

What is filmmaking but groping in the dark?

If you were falling in love and you could go back in time and relive a day and see the banal things you did that you'd forgotten about, you'd weep, looking at that day.

I like actors who, when you see them on screen, you sense a person, not just an actor.

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script.

There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.

You just never know when you're living in a golden age.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

A pitfall of making a comedy with a studio-and it's also an American cultural thing-is that I get tired of being encouraged to go always for laughs.

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

If you have your movies so that everyone understands everything, I think that's probably not a very good movie.

You need to know exactly where you stand in a business at all times. Measure everything, because everything that is measured and watched improves.

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

The actual breakthrough in the privacy of the studio, when one dares to apply paint in a new manner, is a solitary thrill, dependent upon no one else.

Management is the art of getting things done through people.

We must nurture tolerance, collective wisdom, and democracy.

I used to have an imaginary friend named Michael.

Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.