I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.

I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.

I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word "lavish" and everything being magnificent.

A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.

I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.

The irony of a director going to film festivals is you never get to see any of the films.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Great acting is all about being in the moment, being in the present tense.

I decided to be a filmmaker when I was 12. I had utter clarity that this would be my life.

Train your brain to gain.

It is not known why the Lord made the human body as he did, since one might suppose that omnipotence could have made it such as would not have shocked the nice people.

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

So I want to thank the Pentagon, the Soviet Union and the military-industrial complex from the bottom of my heart. Without them, I could never have become the man I am today.

A good bargaine is a pick-purse. [A good bargain is a pick-purse.]

You trust a thief when you trust a woman.

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.

Quality and longevity are the primary criteria, along with repairability and ease of production.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

This will arguably be the third great revolution of America, if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.