I probably wouldn't have done as many as I did in one year, which I did when I was trying to raise money.

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 will never hurt you.

Your words are like mirrors. They may cut, but they also reflect.

If you don't throw it they can't hit it.

But you talk to most filmmakers and it is six, seven, eight years trying to get things off the ground. It is incredible really.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

You don’t pay attention man/that’s why your money is the size of your attention span.

The reason of the close concurrence between the individuals progress and that of the race appears, therefore, when we remember the dependence of each upon the other.

My dream is to continue dancing forever. I would kill myself if I didn’t dance.

The effort to combine the general population of this country with the current burgeoning numbers of illegal immigrants is outrageous, simply outrageous.