I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

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.

Either you run the day or the day runs you..

To develop your intuition, you need to respect it as a natural intelligence.

I think it is the duty of all human beings, as intelligent and communicative beings, to learn all the ideas thought up before ours and use them as a means to think up new ones.

In this section you will learn how to use the tools the way that I think you will choose to use them by default.

I know my dad always wanted to heal the world, and so I think it would be great to follow in his footsteps.

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, because Shakespeare is about nothing but contamination, you might say.

Don't ask for a cig' - I'm so self-centered, I won't even share this cancer.

When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.

Don't look back, because someone might be gaining on you.