If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

I'm tired of having to struggle for what seems to come easily to everyone else.

Self-love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor and vice versa.

The agony of international relations is the need to try to practice politics without the basic conditions for political order.

All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.

I am a career public servant. Until the aftermath of Benghazi, I loved every day of my job.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.

The soul of music slumbers in the shell Till waked and kindled by the master's spell; And feeling hearts, touch them but rightly, pour A thousand melodies unheard before!

A narrow vision is divisive, a broad vision expansive. But a divine vision is all-inclusive.

I would find myself, not necessarily always assigning these little bits of music for here or there, but all of a sudden something would fall into place and it would be exactly that.