If I could be anyone, it would be Brad Pitt.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

People will say, 'There are a million ways to shoot a scene,' but I don't think so. I think there are two, maybe. And the other one is wrong.

Everything seems really simple on paper until you take a camera out of the box.

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

I don't think that digital technology will ever take away the humanity of storytelling, because storytelling is entirely, in and of itself, a wholly human concern.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

In film, we sculpt time, we sculpt behavior and we sculpt light.

I like characters who don't change, who don't learn from their mistakes.

My idea of professionalism is probably a lot of people's idea of obsessive.

A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants, ' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

As I reflect on all my friends and colleagues in my life on this special occasion... Mother is only half the word that immediately comes to mind.

Marx called Darwin a plagiarist and Malthus a fraud. Now all Marxists are Malthusian Darwinists.

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional - a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

New York is all about sort of a corporate sensibility, and it is squeezed out room for any other kind of sensibility, money talks, bullshit walks, I guess.

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

To snatch the worm from the trap.

If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.

I've said it once and I'll say it a a hundred times, I'm forty-four years old.