If you cast the picture correctly, you have a whole lot of leeway. You can make mistakes in other aspects but pull it off with the right actors.

Casting is 65 percent of directing.

There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world.

The accolades usually come when you're dead or too old to get a job

I have gotten to a point in my life where I don't want to have dinner with someone I don't like.

And in Hollywood, you know, everyone is an expert. Most of them are expert editors. They can't direct, they can't write, they can't act, but, by God, they all think they can edit.

I've found that the more experts you have on a movie, the less control the director has.

The importance of the assistant director cannot be overemphasized.

I look at actors very closely. It's not an accident when the actors excel.

First, speaking for myself, I don't want to ever be in a position where I'm telling other directors how to make movies, because I don't think it's any of my business.

The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie.

She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

If someone doesn't like what you bring to the table in a relationship, let them eat alone.

Don't sit with your back to any doors.

She smiled at me, and I never forgot it. Or more accurately, I always remembered it.

The people of the world have a fixed destiny. But the spiritually developed receive what is “not” in their destiny.

Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

I don't like Paris so much.

A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

... oh, I long to prove myself by writing! The best seems to die in me when I give it up. It is the self I love--not this efficient, philanthropic self.