I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

We men are fascinated by the things we don't really understand. It gives us something to think and talk about: like females, they drive us nuts.

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.

Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.

I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it.

With a lot of success comes a lot of negativity.

The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

President George W. Bush is the first American president to call openly for two-states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Islam is politics or it is nothing.