If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France.

Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

[The Player is] not a truthful indictment of Hollywood. It's much uglier than I portrayed it, but nobody would've been interested if I'd shown just how sadistic, cruel and self-orientated it is.

Your own ego is the only trap that I think you can fall into.

I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.

If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.

All of my films deal with the same thing: striving, socially and culturally, to stay alive.

What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.

Character is power.

The first person to fire out of your life when you take your power back, is the one you abused the most, and he or she did not stand up for him/herself.

Difficult times do not produce gentility, as if there is an angle hovering over the world of the oppressed.

Cost little less than new before they're ended.

Come to find out, the Russians were never afraid of the Americans. They weren't raised with the terror that we were by our government. I was struck by how our government misled us for so many years.

How then can we deal with our tendency toward worldliness? It is not by determining that we will not be worldly, but by committing ourselves to becoming more godly.

Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.

Give rejection the finger, and rejection gives it back.

Only human, after all.

How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now? Baghdad cannot be besieged.